Mama Blah Blah

Wee Hours

2012-01-20T02:43:00.001-08:00

Can't sleep.

Starting a new job is exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting. Last night I had the classic teeth-falling-out dream. Tonight, I fell asleep around 10pm, woke up sometime after 12, and haven't been back to sleep since. I have to get up at 6. Fun times.

Yesterday as part of familiarizing myself with my new job, I took a tour of one of our early care facilities which serves kids from 18 months to 3 years with developmental disabilities. It was amazing. It's a really comprehensive program with family support, clinical assessment, occupational therapy and individualized attention for the kids who are medically strong enough to be in a classroom setting. I sat in on a parent support group and then watched some of the kids during Circle Time in the classroom. The kids were singing along with the teacher and they all looked happy and engaged--well, there was one little boy who decided he was not interested in singing just at that moment, so he was sitting apart from the group on a kid-sized couch, looking out the window onto the play yard and up at the sky. We all have our moments when we need to collect ourselves and calm our nerves.

It's important for me to remember this during my first weeks at the new job. As at every non-profit I've worked at, space is at a premium and I am in a shared office with no window. My tendency is to work through lunch while eating at my desk. In my last job, I would often walk out to my car at the end of the day and realize I had not been outside all day since arriving in the morning.

My goal now is to take a cue from that little boy on the couch and be mindful to take a break, rest my nerves, and leave the office so I can look at the sky.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T23:53:00.001-08:00

No, I haven't been eaten by a pack of wolverines, I've just been trying to keep my head above water--but my blog has suffered for many months and I apologize for that. Since the layoff in April 2010, Sweet Dub has been doing freelance videography and photography, and one of his regular clients is a bar/club, which translates into him being gone a lot in the evenings. This translates into me doing the evening routine with the kids by myself, which translates into me being too tired (after a full day of work) to do much else besides fall asleep on the couch watching TV. Sweet Dub comes home and wakes me up in the wee hours, and I often don't get back to sleep for a while. It's not a good pattern.

In the New Year, I resolve to figure out a better balance with this situation, and be more conscientious about making time to write here.

Many blessings, love and light to you and yours in 2012!

Moving On

2011-12-07T16:54:00.001-08:00

So: I gave notice at my job this week. No worries, I have another job to go to. More to come.

Frowny Face

2011-11-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

This morning I was sitting ina ballroom listening to a talk on the neurophysiology of empathy. The presenterstated that one of the major factors involved was facial feedback. Basically, however your face is arranged impactshow you feel—your mood, and even your respiration and your posture. The exampleshe gave was when you are talking with someone and their face is scrunched upin an expression of distress, you subconsciously do the same, and that thisimpacts you physiologically. She told a very interesting story: research showsthat injection of Botox into the area between the eyebrows, where peopletypically get a frown line, has been shown to reduce depression. Because youcan’t physically frown, it impacts your mood!

This is fascinating to me.Not that I’m going to run out and get Botox, but simply because I never reallythought about this at this level and yet it makes sense. How many times haveyou heard from self-help gurus something along the lines of “fake it ‘til youmake it” or “act as if?” The idea is that no matter how you feel, if you put asmile on your face and act as if everything’s great, you create that reality. Itbecomes a self-fulfilling action. Naturally, if you have a serious mentalhealth disorder, this is not going to cut it. But for most people, often timesit’s just a matter of a shift in attitude. Take a minute and regulate yourbreathing, relax your face (unfurrow your brow!), and you are going to feelbetter.

Now, I must have missed the flap about thisresearch when it first came out—and having delved into it now, it turns outthat the doctor who conducted this research only used ten patients as subjects,nine of whom were allegedly depression-free two months after treatment, so it’shardly an authoritative study.

But anecdotally around the web, a number ofpeople have come forward to state that while they got Botox for cosmeticreasons, they noticed two unexpected side effects: the first, a lifting of whathad previously been a lengthy depression; and the second, a reduction inheadaches, including migraines.

Okay, that all sounds pretty great, but thenthere are the cons, among them: facial paralysis. Thanks, but no. Others havesaid Botox seems to suppress certain emotional responses. How can that be healthy? It seemslike if you were sad and wanted to cry, but couldn’t, it would be toxic to yourinsides.

Well, I think I’ll be keeping my frown line and justtry to be more mindful not to scowl while squinting at my screen. How aboutyou?

Being There

2011-11-04T11:32:00.000-07:00

I think I have mentioned on here that there have been somebig bad scary things happening to many people I know. (Oh, yes! Right here.) One of these things is that a good friend of mine (let’s call her “R”) has beendiagnosed with cancer. She is a tough cookie and is convinced she is going tobeat this. She is a single mom with two kids and a very strong support systemof family and friends who are rallying around to help her out.

She has started chemotherapy and is on her fourth round—andher hair has begun falling out. On Halloween night, we got a whole group ofkids together to take them trick-or-treating around her childhood neighborhood,where her mom still lives. R. was dressed as a punk rocker, with a RamonesT-shirt and a fantastic hot pink and black long wig. I told her I think sheshould wear the pink wig every day. She told me she couldn’t stop looking at myhair. I really wanted to shave my head right about then.

She told me amazing stories about how her kids have beenhelping to take care of her. I had suggested that we take the kids this weekendfor her since she was scheduled for treatment again on Thursday and she gets sosick afterward. (Her mom and sister will be taking care of her, she won’t be byherself.) “[The 7-year-old] might go,” she said. “But [the 11-year-old] won’tleave me.” Her sweet son, who is already taller than I am, breaks my heart inhis tenderness with her.

It’s been challenging with R. I reach out and sometimes shewill accept help and sometimes a wall goes up and I have to just step back andlet her work it out. I hope she beats this.

Neat-O

2011-10-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

Viva recently got a bee in her bonnet about tidying up before bed. She picked up all the toys in the living room, folded up all the throw blankets we had strewn about, and replaced all the throw pillows on the couch and loveseat. Then she wiped down the dining table and said,"I moved the napkin holder into the middle of the table so it's equidistantly in reach."

Who IS this person???

I May Have to Concede

2011-10-03T16:40:00.001-07:00

Having just purchased a box of haircolor to cover my roots, I look in the mirror and conclude I am fighting a losing battle.

Is there a way to gracefully go gray? Discuss.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Up, Up and Away

2011-09-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

The other day, when I was working from home, it was a beautiful day. The weather has been a bit cool, which Viva doesn’t appreciate, because now that we live somewhere with a pool, she wants to spend virtually every free moment in it. Since she was thwarted in her Pool Dreams over the weekend, Sweet Dub decided he would pick her up early from her after-school program and take her swimming. To optimize the experience for her, I told Sweet Dub I would pick up Ceeya from preschool and take her to the market with me while I picked up some groceries. Viva would get free time with her dad and since Ceeya doesn’t really swim, and thinks she can, and very much complicates the pool experience, this would take her out of the equation and minimize stress for all involved. (Sorry, future Ceeya, that you were deliberately left out of the Funnest Time EVER. Mommy loves you.)

So we went our separate ways. I pulled up at preschool, spent some time with Ceeya and friends, and then we (just Ceeya and I) motored on to the market, just five minutes away. Shortly after we arrived, Ceeya saw a big red strawberry balloon with a face on it and insisted she must have it. It was the most incredible thing in the world to her, and it was eight dollars. FOR A BALLOON. I admit I was feeling a little guilty that Viva was having her fun time without her sister, so I grabbed the balloon for Ceeya and clipped it to her jacket. It floated along with us hither and yon throughout the store.

Speaking of which, the market is a massive Ralphs which stretches from here to Chicago and back. About halfway through our very leisurely journey through the store—remember, I was trying to give Sweet Dub and Viva some time together—Ceeya said she had to go pee. Naturally, the bathroom was somewhere east of the Mississippi, but somehow we managed to make it in time, and Ceeya beamed as I told her how proud I was that she did not have an accident. We washed up, reclaimed our cart and merrily trudged back to the other side of the ~~moon~~ store, got the rest of our items, waited in a really long line, and finally left the store.

As I was putting the groceries in the back of the car, Ceeya decided she didn’t want the balloon clipped to her jacket anymore and she pulled it off.

Up, up, up into the sky it went.

This is when Ceeya completely lost her mind. Louder than any child has ever screamed since the dawn of time, she let it all out, veins sticking out in her neck, her whole face turning purple, her entire being outraged and her overall attitude one of, “WHAT THE---?? DID YOU SEE WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME???”

And that is when a very nice older gentleman approached and asked what had happened, and then offered to give me a dollar to buy Ceeya another balloon. And because I am an idiot, I blurted out that it was not just a dollar, it was eight dollars, and then he offered to give me half. And then I politely refused. And then we went back and forth like one does, and he insisted he must give me money. “Look at her, she’s hysterical,” he said. So finally I said yes, okay, it was very sweet of him, and then he pulled out a twenty and asked me if I had change. Which miraculously I did.

And then he asked her name, and then he instructed her very seriously that when she got the balloon, “Don’t let it go. Hold it tight in your hand, like this, baby! Will you do that? Do you promise?” and by this time, Ceeya was very quiet and very serious and she nodded and I thanked him again and we went back inside and had to find someone to get us another balloon exactly like it and then we stood in line again and paid for the dang balloon and then we got back in the car and I shoved the balloon into the back seat with my purse on top of it so it wouldn’t float into my line of vision as I was driving the five minutes back home. And then my phone rang from the back seat where I couldn’t reach it because it was inside my purse and I knew it was Sweet Dub wondering where in hell we were.

And that, my friends, is the story of how just stopping by the store for a few things to kill some time turned into an hour and a half odyssey that cost me 12 squillion dollars in balloons and made us late for dinner (which I had to cook).

Viva, on the other hand, had a great time.

Testing

2011-09-27T23:15:00.001-07:00

Disregard--just testing to see if I can actually publish from my phone. Thanks for your patience.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Not Really Amazing

2011-09-27T15:13:00.000-07:00

Today I am working from home, in the living room of my newapartment. I am facing the windows, and all I can see is trees. It is abeautiful sunny day, but not hot—perfect Southern California autumn weather. A slight breeze is blowing.

I spent a big chunk of my day working on one writingproject, writing and rewriting and reading here and there online to flesh out ideasand going back to rewrite. Then I took a walk, came back, had a snack, quicklywent through email, and decided to sit a minute and try and get back in thehabit of writing for myself. I find that if I don’t post for a while that whenI sit down to write I don’t know where to start. Once I start, I often go backand delete whole paragraphs from the beginning. I don’t love getting started,but I do love having written and being done.

I am distracted these days. Lots of big, bad things happening to people I love—and since they’re nothappening to me, I don’t feel I can completely share here. Nonetheless, I amworried, and upset, and distracted. Whatdo you do to distract yourself?

I am listening to lots of music, and getting irritated withiTunes, since sometimes it will let me purchase songs from my phone andsometimes not. It makes for a very disjointed playlist, which I am trying toembrace so as not to be annoyed. I am trying to let it play out as it wants.

In related news, I am reading lots of comparative religiousstuff these days. I find the similarities between various world religionscalming—just in terms of the very basic messages. Love each other, treat othersthe way you’d want to be treated, etc. Sometimes the unexplainable happens. Isit a miracle? Do such things exist?

Parenting small children is also very distracting. I am verytickled by my kids’ use of language. Rightnow, Ceeya is apt to say, when something doesn’t please her, “Mom, that is not really amazing.” She is not saying it in opposition to me, asif I have said something is amazing. No, she is just letting me know, drawingmy attention to something—maybe she expected to like it, but she doesn’t, andso it is not really amazing, and she says it with great seriousness, lookingdeeply into my eyes with her giant dark brown ones. And I say to her, “I amsorry that it is not really amazing. I hope you find something else that isreally amazing.” And I think she will.

And I hope you do, too. Because right now some things are not really amazing. And I wish theywould turn around a bit.

P.S. Do you want to know what else is not really amazing? Blogger insisting I should switch over to Google Chrome. And then all my posts publishing with the format all wonky. That is extra really not amazing.

P.P.S. I chose to work from home today because of several chaotic events going on at work. My co-worker friend, who is in the office today, emailed me to let me know it was a good call because I would really be annoyed if I had gone in. I wrote back, "I think annoyed is my default setting." That is also not really amazing. I don't enjoy being annoyed (although it is good fodder for humorous anecdotes). I am trying to work on being less annoyed. I'll let you know how I progress.

This Must Be the Place

2011-09-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

Home - is where I want to be

But I guess I’m already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place

-- Talking Heads

Home is where the heart is.

-- traditional proverb

Mama, I yike this new house!

-- Ceeya

Viva is eight years old, and she has lived in five differenthomes. Heck, Ceeya is not even three and she is on her third residence. That isa lot of moving.

I have been thinking a lot about what home means lately. Imoved a lot as a kid—not just from apartment to apartment but from school toschool as we moved. I moved away to college in Pennsylvania, and then I movedback to my hometown of Boston. And then I moved all the way across country, toSan Diego and then Los Angeles. Pre-marriage, I also moved a lot within LosAngeles, which I actually enjoyed because I got to try out a lot of differentneighborhoods.

Moving sucks. At the same time, I like moving. I likefinding a new place, exploring how things fit together, figuring out new routesto work and school, discovering the little gems of each new place. Now eventhough we have only moved about three miles away from our old place, I amlearning all the ins and outs of our new neighborhood and our new space. Thereare so many pleasant little surprises as you go.

And at the end of the day, no matter where we are, when Iopen the door and hear, “Mommy’s home!”: I am home. And I get to plop down in the middle of my grabby, yelly,huggy family and be bombarded by tales of the day and how hungry they are andlook at their boo-boos and fingerpaintings and math homework and the latestphotographs Sweet Dub has taken. And what could be better than that?

The Blah Blahs Have Landed

2011-09-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

I won’t bore you with the details, but on Friday, September 9, the Blah Blah Family finally moved.

It took weeks of preparation, as we were essentially cutting our living space in half—moving from a three bedroom house with a separate studio to a two bedroom apartment. If you have never had to do something like this, well, I am not going to say you should try it. But it was cathartic, the amount of stuff we had to go through and decide what we could and could not live without. And also, with the number of times we have moved in the past five years, I have never had a decent amount of time to go through all my belongings and decide what I did not need to keep. Since I knew space was at a premium, I elected to take a week off between Labor Day and Moving Day to devote myself 100% to going through every room in the house and culling all unnecessary items. Result: this time around I was shredding tax documents dating all the way back to 1998. Can you imagine? I’ve been carting all that stuff around?! It boggles the mind.

So: lots of trips to Goodwill to give stuff away, handing over bags of outgrown clothes to Viva’s friend in second grade, a bed to Sweet Dub’s stepbrother, a couch to the Parent Center at our local elementary school—and countless trips to put stuff in storage. Sweet Dub is determined to empty out the stuff in storage (lots of baby items—stroller, car seat, etc. in excellent condition) by putting it on Craigslist/eBay. We shall see.

I have added another 15 minutes to my commute, which means I leave the house with Viva by 7:30 AM, drop her off at school at 7:45-7:50ish, and get to work by 8:15. I am trying to mellow out about it and listen to podcasts or mixes I love on 8tracks or Pandora by hooking up my phone to my car radio. It’s not the end of the world, but for those familiar with LA, I am driving from Culver City/Fox Hills to Echo Park and back during rush hour. I do not recommend it.

The kids are happy, because now we have a pool and Viva can swim every day and Ceeya can float about with her life jacket on when she feels up to it. There are long stretches of pathways and sidewalks that they can tear about on, on their bikes. We are all together, which is all that matters when it comes down to it.

Related story: the night before the move, as I was putting the kids to bed, I said, “Okay, you guys, time to sleep and not a peep. Daddy and I are really busy getting things ready for the move tomorrow so I need you guys to go right to bed and no shenanigans.”

Ceeya: (Sniff. SNIFF!)

Viva: Mom?

Mama Blah (extricating from the bedclothes): Yes, Veev?

Viva: Ceeya is crying.

Mama Blah: No she’s not, she’s fake crying, just like she fake hiccups. You know she does that.

Ceeya: (SNIFF, SNIFF!)

Viva: No, Mom, I think she’s really crying. Look at her eyes.

Mama Blah (peering in the dim light of the nightlight and realizing she’s right): Ceeya? Are you crying?

Ceeya flings herself into my lap.

Mama Blah: Oh, no! What’s wrong, baby? Are you sad?

Ceeya (wrapping her arms around my legs): Yah.

Mama Blah: Are you sad about the move? About having to leave this house?

Ceeya (mournfully): YeeeAAAAH.

Mama Blah: Aw, honey. That’s normal. We’ve had a lot of happy times in this house. But we’re also going to have a lot of happy and fun times in the new house, okay?

Viva: Yeah, Ceeya, it has a really big bathtub [the pool] for you to play in! And we’re right by the park! And lots of kids live around there!

Mama Blah: That’s right. We’re going to go swimming, and to the playground…

Ceeya : (SNIFF! SNIFF!) I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE DADDY! (breaks down completely)

Mama Blah: What??
Viva (simultaneously): Oh my God.

Mama Blah: Baby, Daddy’s coming with us to the new house. You thought we were leaving him behind?
Viva (simultaneously): Oh my God, Ceeya, you’re so weird, we’re not leaving Daddy!

Mama Blah: Viva, go get your dad. (Viva leaves the room.) Ceeya, baby, we all go together—you, me, Viva and Daddy. We are ALWAYS together. We would never move and leave Daddy, okay? We are all going to live together in the new house. (Sweet Dub arrives and we all pile in for a big Blah Blah Family hug as he reassures her.)

Man, kids are something else.

By the way, any tips for cooking on an electric stove? I’m completely useless at it.

Rockin' It

2011-09-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Following up on my last post: on Saturday, Viva got her hair trimmed and re-done in a half-twisted, half-out chunky 'fro. She totally rocks it. She was really happy with it and then on Tuesday some little girl at camp told her that her hair looked nappy.

Now, you know what? Her hair is nappy. I don't have a problem with that. As with many words that should be non-offensive but have become negative because of how they are used, it was the way she said it that I have a problem with. Like nappy is the worst thing it could be. Like nappy is synonymous with ugly. I am not teaching my kid that she should hate what God gave her.

Look at the picture again. And try and tell me that my child--my smart, funny, kind and sociable kid--should be made to feel ugly. Some people drink a bit too much Haterade. And self-Haterade is the worst kind.

I'm off to see if I can find a "Happy to be Nappy" T-shirt. Wish me luck.

My Baby is a Maverick

2011-08-24T16:52:00.000-07:00

My Viva is 8 years old. She is bigger than she has ever been, but she is still, in the scheme of things, a little girl. She often shows such maturity and a sensibility beyond her years that I forget she is still quite small yet.

This weekend, after I took her box braids out on Saturday, she wore her hair “wild” on Sunday. At first she was rocking a Macy Gray-style ‘fro, but then she styled her hair so it fell across her forehead. “I want to have rock star hair!” she said. I noticed her hair could use a trim and some conditioning (she’s been swimming a lot this summer and her hair is drier than usual), but no harm hanging around the house or going to Target like that. However, on Sunday evening, which is usually Hair Night, she told me in no uncertain terms that she wanted to wear her hair “out” to camp the next day.

“Ooooh,” said Sweet Dub. “I don’t know about that.”

“Honey, tomorrow is a swim day,” I said. “Do you really want to go with your hair out? It might not look the way you want it to when you come out of the pool.”

“I don’t care,” said Viva.

“Kids might make fun of you if you wear your hair wild,” Sweet Dub said.

“I don’t care,” said Viva. “I like my hair. It’s cool.”

After a bit more discussion, we agreed that she should wear her hair how she wants. I have been a big cheerleader for natural hair over Viva’s lifetime, so evidently it somehow soaked in. She very rarely wears an Afro; her preference is for two-strand twists so she can shake her head and feel her hair swing around. I was pleased she stood her ground, but a little apprehensive. After we concluded our conversation, I said to Sweet Dub privately, “I have a feeling I’ll be doing hair tomorrow night.”

The next day, I dampened Viva’s hair, put some moisturizing crème on it and sent her off to camp. When Ceeya and I went to pick her up at the end of the day, she was standing off to the side of the gym, by herself. She gathered her things and as we were walking out, she said, “Mom, I had a horrible day,” and then she started crying.

Kids made fun of her hair all day. She cried as we walked home, and she continued crying as we sat with her dad and talked about it. Not only did a variety of kids (most of whom were bigger than she is, since this camp admits kids age 7 and up) make fun of her hair throughout the day, but one of her closest friends told her that her hair looked ugly. (This is a kid who usually is at our house after camp literally 4-5 days per week. She is the daughter of a single mom, one of Sweet Dub’s best friends from high school who works until 6 in Santa Monica and can’t pick her up on time. We consider this child family, one of Viva’s “play cousins.” She eats dinner with us several nights a week, we are her emergency contact for the camp, etc. I could not believe that in this instance she would not have Viva’s back. Yes, I am still furious at this 7-year-old child. It is not rational. Let me back off this tangent before I really get going.)

We all cuddled in a pile on the couch, Viva’s beautiful eyes shiny with tears as she let all the stored-up heartache of the day spill forth.

“This is not your problem, this is their problem. It says more about them than it says about you. Your hair is beautiful and you can wear it how you want,” I said.

“You don’t have to do what everyone else does,” Sweet Dub said. “You can be different. It’s people like you who change the world. Who cares what they think?”

“You crying? Why Coco* is crying?” Ceeya said, patting her sister’s leg.

(What is really infuriating to me is that the vast majority of the kids in the camp are also black. “The same flipping hair grows out of their heads!” I said to Sweet Dub later in my Mama Bear rage. “They don’t even know what their own friggin’ natural texture looks like!”)

After she dried her tears and blew her nose, Viva said, “I’m going to wear my hair like this for the rest of the week. Because I LIKE IT.”

She is badass. I wish I had that confidence at 8. And I’m proud of her.

* Coco is her nickname for Viva. This in itself is a long story.

All Over the Place

2011-08-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

Are you still there?

My mind is kind of running amok these days. Work has been extra busy since sometime in May. As I reached a deadline of July 15th for a major project, about to breathe a sigh of relief and expecting to take just a couple of days off, my boss informed me that she needed me to write a $500,000 proposal, due in less than two weeks, on a brand new project we are developing. “You’re not going to be able to take any time off until August—like me,” she said. I was already fried then, but I sucked it up and just kept going. It had to be done, and no one else could do it. My boss has been working every weekend since March. She is a machine! (And I say this with affection. She never asks more than she would do herself.)

So: other deadline reached. While others loom, we have both cried Uncle. She is off on vacation and I am finally going to get some time off later this week (just a couple of days to celebrate my birthday. I will be 43. Ye Gods!). I will then come back, refreshed, and work a couple more weeks before I take a full week off around Labor Day, at which point we will be moving into the hypothetical new home we are miraculously going to find this week. (Yes, I agree, not much of a vacation.)

Here’s where we are with that: given our current economic status, we need to downsize. Sweet Dub, God bless him, has been out of work since April 2010. While he has been exploring various avenues*, freelancing and the like, he does not have a regular source of income. Our house, which is awesome, is a little big for us and we could stand to go smaller. While I was hoping we could find a modest house to rent in the area, here is what I am finding:

(1) small, rundown crappy houses where I would have to buy a gun and a German Shepherd 5 minutes after moving in or, if in a reasonably safe area, houses which need major home improvements/repairs which have not yet even begun but are “planned” (e.g. installation of central heat);

(2) huge, rundown houses that would cost a fortune to heat and cool;

(3) ridiculously overpriced condos;

(4) cute houses in decent condition that are a good $500-$1000 more a month than we can comfortably spend.

An added wrinkle is that to remain in proximity to our current neighborhood—i.e. within a three-mile radius—we are looking at areas that are actually not in our school district. We are on the border of Culver City, which has a really good school system, and we are also on the border of Ladera Heights, which I just recently learned is not part of Los Angeles Unified but part of the Inglewood School District (definitely NOT good schools, from all I’ve read and heard). For many reasons, this bums me out, because Viva is happy with the magnet program at her LAUSD school and I would hate to move her. As I’ve said before, we love the neighborhood we’re in and feel very much a part of the community, so we want to stay in the general area.

We have finally faced the facts and are looking at apartments (still not in our current neighborhood, because the trend there seems to be “nice little houses not-for-rent” and “kind of crummy apartment buildings.” Not sure why this is. ). I am trying to make peace with this.

I know, woe is me with my petty little problems. I grew up in a series of cramped apartments, so I know where my resistance on this comes from. But really: “Oh noes, we have to move into an apartment!” It’s not the end of the world. I am lucky, given the continuing crappy economy, to have a job. I can still feed my family. So we will have to give up our cushy house with the yard and our illusion of suburban home living. Big freakin’ deal, right?

But honestly, I am not trying to live in the lap of luxury. I just want a place that’s clean, and safe, and peaceful. I don’t want to have to spend my first few days in a new place scrubbing to get it clean. If you know me in real life, you know I am not a neat freak. Trust when I say that too many of the places we have been seeing are grubby. I can’t believe people expect you to spend hard-earned money to move into a place that is raggedy and dirty.

This weekend I saw a house for lease which, if I had been in the market to buy, I might have considered. I might have been able to live with its flaws if I knew I could fix them. It was spacious, it had great bones, and it was in a quiet neighborhood with a decent yard. The paint on the exterior was peeling, the upstairs bathroom was godawful (bright pink tile and a baby blue bathtub), and the whole interior had a feeling of neglect. Walls needed spackling and painting, carpet should have been ripped up and replaced or maybe let the hardwood floors come out to play. In any event, I knew Sweet Dub (who was off hammering out some legal issues with prospective partners in Glendale) would hate it. I had to smile and pass.

Right now it is looking like we are apartment-bound, for sure. I am less upset about that today than I was over the weekend. Stay tuned.

* Sweet Dub has really been working hard to get a number of television projects off the ground. This is an added frustration, because while he does have interest from some major players, including a cable network, things move slowly. Everyone is very encouraging; we are hopeful that he will get a deal but it could be six months from now. Or, it being Hollywood, it could be never. He now has three projects in development, one of which looks like it will actually happen (network people have been flying out from New York to talk with him, they email back and forth constantly) but not before we move. Of course. Sigh.

It’s All Good in My ‘Hood

2011-07-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Blah Blah Family has had our fair share of crappy luck with housing. Since 2006, we have rented three houses in the Los Angeles area, and in every single case the owner has had to move back into the house due to a change in personal circumstances. This is our third house and our favorite so far, and again, we have to move.

I will miss the house itself, as we have lived here for almost two years and that is most of Ceeya’s life, so a lot of great memories were made inside these walls. The house is a good size for us—actually, a little big for us, which means more house to clean, and obviously I don’t love that aspect of it. The yard is ginormous. When people visit us they can’t get over it, and I love that aspect of the property too. But what I will miss most about it is the neighborhood it’s in.

I want to say the house is on a cul-de-sac, but in actuality it sits right at the middle part of a crescent-shaped street. You turn off of a main road, follow the street around in a loop and it takes you right back out to the main road. The local elementary school is right down the street, so we walk Viva to school. The park and recreation center is next to the school, and Viva goes to an after-school program and summer camp there, and has also played in their T-ball and Little Jammers basketball leagues. Last weekend our local Councilmember sponsored a Movies in the Park night, and I took the girls over while Sweet Dub was out working on a freelance gig. We spread out a blanket on the baseball diamond near some friends, and when Ceeya got sleepy, I had no qualms about taking her home and leaving Viva “alone” to continue to watch the movie. Another friend said she’d just drop her off at home when the movie ended. As it turned out, Sweet Dub got home twenty minutes later and just walked over to get her, but he didn’t have to.

Given our proximity to the park, and Viva’s involvement in sports, we’ve gotten to know a lot of our neighbors. People are friendly. It’s also a racially mixed neighborhood, which (with the range of skin tones in my family) makes me feel comfortable. When you go to the supermarket, there’s a mixture of black, Asian, white, Hispanic—all of which I naively expected to find in every neighborhood when I moved to LA (hey, they said it was one of the most diverse cities in the world). I would classify it as a solidly middle-class neighborhood if I had to throw a label on it.

I like when I am walking down the street either to or from the school in the morning and people honk and wave, or I stop to talk to my neighbor and his 3-year-old as they head off to preschool and work. I like that I run into people I know—friends from Viva’s old preschool, her 2nd grade teacher, the mom of a classmate—at Target, at the mall, at the market, and we stop to have a friendly chat. I love that my neighborhood is welcoming and pleasant to move about in. I love that it’s clean and has nice big trees and people walking their dogs and kids riding their scooters to the park.

Lately I have become really nostalgic about having to move and leave our little corner of the universe. We lucked into finding this house. It is really hard to find a rental in this area. We’ve looked at a couple of options in a three-mile radius but the places have been really run-down, or too small, or too big.

Sigh. The perfect place will manifest, right? I’m trying to be all about the power of positive thinking and focus on all the things I love about this situation so I can be clear about what I’m looking for. But I think I’m just trying to replicate this house and this block. Maybe that means we’ll find something even better?

Betwixt and Between

2011-06-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

Help! My kid is becoming a tween!
Let’s look at the evidence:

(1) She is borrowing my clothes. Right now she prefers my T-shirts to her own.

(2) She is refusing to wear barrettes or ballies in her hair because they are too “little girlish.”

(3) She has become very picky about clothes and shoes. It is really difficult because she has never been terribly girly, but she doesn’t wear boys’ clothes either. Right now I am skating (unintentional pun) a thin line by buying her a lot of sportswear and surf/skate type of clothes. She’s really into Converse and Vans. I used to be able to buy clothes for her without taking her with me (she hates to shop). This new direction of hers is cramping my style.

(4) She needs to wear deodorant. I don’t mean she is asking to wear it. I mean she HAS to or you have to open a window.

(4)(b) She also needs to shower every day.

(5) She now has a signature hairstyle and won’t let me change it up. This is actually fine, because I basically make small twists all over her head once a week and leave it except for spritzing with water/leave-in or oiling her scalp and ends. She was unhappy with me recently when I did a “quick” hairstyle that she deemed childish (basically parting her hair into four sections and braiding each section. I know, but I was in a hurry.) I confess to being a bit bummed about this because I like variety, but I can’t complain because at least her hair is in a protective style.

(6) It is difficult to determine which sneakers are hers and which are mine if you stumble across them in a dim room. If you hold them up next to each other, there is only a slight difference in size.

(7) I can comfortably rest my chin on the top of her head when she stands in front of me.

(8) She is becoming more responsible. She asks for chores!

(9) She is cultivating patience. She’s amazing with her sister, who is roaring through her “two-hood” like nobody’s business and rounding the corner on three, saints preserve us.

(10) She planted seeds and grew a plant, watering it faithfully, and lo, it did not die.

(11) Right now, at this moment, she wants to be a teacher. My grandpa would be proud.

(12) She recently had an epiphany that I might occasionally want some alone time. You know, like twenty minutes to read or watch a TV show on the DVR and fast forward through the commercials. This doesn’t mean she gives it to me, but at least she recognizes that I am a person with my own needs, as well as being her mom.

(13) She watches programs like Through the Wormhole with her dad and they argue about quantum physics.

(14) She’s coming into her own creatively. She likes to cartoon, and make films, and we are working on a book together. It is amazing to watch her bloom.

Okay, so maybe tween-dom isn’t a bad thing. It’s just freaking me out that my baby may soon be borrowing my shoes.

Have I mentioned that she's only 8?

A Bump in the Preschool Road

2011-05-16T16:39:00.001-07:00

With all that's been going on in the past couple of months, I realize I have not yet written about Ceeya's transition to preschool. Ceeya moved from daycare, where she'd been since she was only a few months old, to preschool at the beginning of April. It was a long search which I haven't fully detailed here (and I won't go into it now), but we ended up finding a preschool program we were comfortable with in a church about four to five miles from our house.

I love Ceeya's teacher, Miss Mary. She is clearly committed to the kids. She does special theme-based projects with them and focuses on areas of concern—she had no hesitation about working with Ceeya on her sensory processing issues and has made great strides with her in terms of potty training. We are very close to moving Ceeya out of Pull-Ups and into cloth training pants, despite training being somewhat interrupted and erratic when we pulled her out of school for a week immediately after my grandmother passed. Ceeya loves Miss Mary and talks enthusiastically about school and how she had a good day, every day.

On Friday, I worked from home and Sweet Dub had a video gig in the late afternoon, so he asked if I would pick up Ceeya. (Normally it would be difficult for me to pick her up since preschool is nearly 5 miles southwest of our house, and work is 10 miles northeast. That's 15 Los Angeles miles across town in rush hour, which translates into at least 45 minutes to get there and then another 15-20 minutes to slog back home. I am not a big fan of traffic. If Sweet Dub weren't available to do the pickup on the regular, this would really suck.) He usually picks her up by 4:00 PM so he can talk with her teacher before she leaves for the day.

As I was mired in my project, I did not make it to school before 4:00 PM. I arrived at 4:30, and as I walked from my car to the building I could see Ceeya's classmates out in the yard. When Miss Mary leaves at 4 PM, Ceeya's class gets combined with another class and the director of the school comes in to help out to ensure they have the correct ratio of adults to kids. The director and the other preschool teacher, Miss C, were out in the yard. I waved and looked for Ceeya but didn't see her—not strange because she might have been inside one of the climbing structures. I walked into the school and into Ceeya's classroom and I heard a child crying loudly.

More specifically, I heard Ceeya crying loudly.

I hurried into the adjoining classroom and Ceeya was sitting at a table with her back to me, sobbing. "Ceeya!" I called out. "What happened? Did you hurt yourself?"

She turned around and her eyes were puffy, and her nose was red, and I could tell she had been crying for a while. I looked around as I gathered her into my arms to soothe her. No adults in sight. What on earth? My brain couldn't process what might have happened, and Ceeya was crying too hard to talk. I went outside to the yard.

"Ceeya was in the classroom alone, crying," I said to Miss C, as she simultaneously asked, "Where was she?"

"What? She was inside?" she said. She looked Ceeya over with concern. "How did that happen?"

The director came hurrying over. "I was just asking, 'Where's Ceeya?'" she said. What a pile of baloney, I wanted to say. The only reason you wondered where Ceeya was is because you just saw me walk up.

"She must have followed me back inside without me knowing it, when I went back in to get balls for the children," Miss C said. "Oh, no, sweetheart, I'm so sorry."

Ceeya lay on my shoulder, quiet, but holding on tight. All I could think to myself was how lucky they were that it was me who found her, and not her dad. And then I thought how lucky we were that she didn't put something in her mouth and choke, or climb on something to get at a toy and fall, or hurt herself a million different ways. And how lucky we were that one of the outside utility workers who were there that day, working on lines outside the church, wasn't a predator looking for kids by themselves.

I spent ten more minutes there as they tried to figure it out and apologized and told me they didn't know how it could have happened. I still don't know how Ceeya got locked into the classroom by herself. All she will say is that she was by herself, and she was crying.

I still like the preschool. I'm angry that this happened, even though it was clearly not intentional. I have the feeling that Ceeya probably did closely follow the teacher back inside and then sat down with a toy somewhere she couldn't be seen, and the teacher left her there.

When Sweet Dub spoke with Miss Mary about it this morning, she had not yet heard about it, and she was livid. I feel certain this would not have happened if she were there, and I feel confident that she will always look out for Ceeya. At the same time, this can't go unaddressed. Sweet Dub was unable to find the director this afternoon when he went to pick Ceeya up. I am hoping that tomorrow morning he will be able to speak with her about our concerns.

I am also hoping that my next preschool post will be a lot more positive.

Alone, But Not Lonely

2011-05-06T12:20:00.001-07:00

What a whirlwind the past couple of weeks have been. My grandmother has been gone for two weeks already and I feel like I still have not had time to process it. I have been spending a lot of time with my mother. She cared for my grandmother through her long illness and was definitely the person who was closest to her in many ways.

Because my grandmother depended so heavily on her, my mom hardly left the house except to get to doctor's appointments or to the market or pharmacy. Until two days after my grandmother's death, my mother—who lives 45 minutes away, in Ventura County—had never been to my house.

My sister and brother-in-law, who with my nephews share the house with my mom and grandma, had booked a cruise months ago for April 27th, just a week after my grandma passed. So the day after the viewing in San Diego County, as my grandmother's body was being flown back east for burial in the family plot, my sister and her family took their trip as planned. My mom was alone in the house (where my grandmother had just died) for the first time ever in more than five years.

I asked her if she would be all right, if she wanted me to come and stay with her, but I knew she would say no. My mother and I are very similar in our need for time alone. I honestly think this oddly-timed vacation was one of the best things that could have happened, to give her time and space alone to get used to a world without her mother in it. I have called her just about every day to check in, and while her sleeping schedule is out of whack, other than that she is doing fine.

Last Saturday, I took the kids up to spend the day with her. We drove to Ventura Harbor, had fish and chips and ice cream. We took lots of pictures, and laughed a lot, and enjoyed the sun and the water and people watching. My mom was happy. The kids were exhausted and happy. At the end of the day as we were driving home, Viva said, "That was the most fun I've ever had with Grandma." Bittersweet.

My mom and I have had our differences and our difficulties in the past, and she can still push my buttons like no one else can. But, at the same time, helping each other through this transition has brought us closer.

Of course, this weekend is Mother's Day. We will be celebrating together tomorrow, as my sister and her noisy bunch arrive back in Southern California sometime tomorrow and I'd like to give them their space to recoup on Sunday. Sweet Dub and Viva are on a road trip to Northern California to celebrate my 22-year-old nephew's graduation from college, returning Sunday morning, so it will be me and my ole roll dog Ceeya* holding down the fort until Mother's Day festivities can commence on Sunday.

To all: thanks for your words of support and comfort. It means more to me than I can say. Happy Mother's Day, whether you are a mom or have a mom, or are just one bad mutha-shut yo mouth. Be safe and be happy!

* I would love to be part of the road trip, but the very idea of six hours one way with a 2.5 year-old makes me want to poke a chopstick in my ear. Or my eye. Or up my nose. Whatever, it would be painful.

She is Gone

2011-04-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

After 85 years, she is gone.

My grandmother passed away late Wednesday night. There are no words.

I am grateful for her. That is all I can think to say. She was a very strong personality, hugely determined, funny (sometimes unintentionally), and so loving. I never ever for a second ever in my life doubted that my grandmother loved me and was for me, 100%. I learned so many life lessons from her.

I am so sad. And my brain is really scrambled and I feel incapable of putting together anything coherent.

Viva headed back to school today after a week of Spring Break. I asked her how she felt her vacation was. She said on a scale of 1 to 10, it was about a 5, because it started out great, but Thursday was horrible. When we drove up to the house on Thursday, “there was a hole [in the room] where Nana should be sleeping,” is how she put it.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

I am trying to figure it all out. Bear with me.

Strange Days Indeed

2011-04-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Anonymous Woman who Wanted Just a Small Salad This Afternoon,

I am sympathetic to you. I realize that it could just as easily be me who is hungry and does not have enough money for food. However, when you come up to me as I am standing in line at the salad place and ask me not once, not twice, but three times to give you money, and then, even as I politely for the third time tell you I cannot help you, roll your eyes at me? Girlfriend, you just lost me.

You do not know me, and I do not know you. You don’t know my coworker either. She is a single mother raising five kids. I have kids, too, both of whom just outgrew their shoes, and a husband who has been laid off for over a year. We are squeezing every penny. Times are hard.

You are not the first person to ask me for money today. I am sorry, Anonymous Woman. But you don’t get to decide what I do with my money, and being rude doesn’t help your cause.

I hope that things turn around for you soon.

Most sincerely,
Mama Blah Blah

To Make You Smile

2011-04-13T16:31:00.000-07:00

Me and my two lovelies. The picture feels like a hug to me.

Love you, love you, love you

2011-04-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

Sweet Dub is out tonight, taking photographs for a client. I am home with the kids, who seem to be doing everything possible to tap dance on my last nerve. I lose my temper more than once. I finally banish them to their room to play so I can have 10 minutes of peace and that is when I realize I am on the verge of tears and have been all day.

My grandmother, you see, is passing over into the other realm. I have just spent the weekend with her--a weekend where she was not once conscious--and it was very, very tough. She is in the phase which I am told is called "active dying," so she is very agitated, raking at the bedclothes and wearing an expression of acute pain or distress. She doesn't open her eyes.

My mom says that this morning she spoke. My mom was able to tell her she loved her, and my grandmother said she loved her too. I am glad they at least had this moment, as my grandmother has been rather disoriented in the last week and at one point was convinced my mom had tricked her. She became very fretful, saying she knew there must be a phone around here somewhere. My sister asked her who she wanted to call, and my grandma said she wanted to call my grandpa (who passed away 7 years ago). I'm not sure what she thought my mom had tricked her about, but it's funny that she was going to tell on her to my grandpa.

My mother was 19 when she had my sister, and 21 when she had me, and 22 when she took us and left my dad. My grandmother was 41 when she became a grandmother. When my mom left my dad, she moved in with my grandparents for a while. My mom was an only child, and my grandma had always wanted a houseful of kids. My mother likes to say that she had my grandma's other kids for her. All I know is that my grandma loved us to pieces and she was in constant motion, usually doing something for one of us. She would play leapfrog with us, and build snowmen with us, and when she wasn't doing that, she was cooking something obscenely delicious (and with the benefit of hindsight, ridiculously fattening).

In time we moved out to a series of apartments as my mom went back to college, but we were never more than 15 minutes away from my grandparents at any time. We were expected at their house every weekend, even after my mom remarried. My grandmother took early retirement in her 50s. If I got sick at school, it was Grandma who would come and get me and worry over me tenderly. My grandmother loved us all loudly and with great ferocity. She is not a tall woman (we are the same height, 5-feet and one-inch on a good day), but she has always been formidable. She expected a lot of us, but she expected a lot of herself--something I didn't recognize until I was well until adulthood.

My grandma, Muriel, grew up in a small town in a very segregated area of Virginia. She is a very fair-skinned black woman who could pass for white if that were the road she chose. In her small town, everyone knew her family and she was known to be "colored," so she had to sit in the back of the local bus and when in town, couldn't sit at the counter at the local diner or drink at particular water fountains. She met my grandpa while she was waiting tables at her cousin's restaurant during World War II. He was a very handsome light-skinned man on shore leave from the Navy. "I don't know what he saw in me," she has said on more than one occasion, but if you see pictures of her from this era, she is a beauty. She loved to laugh and loved to talk. His family were New Englanders and very reserved, so I can see how he would be captivated. I would imagine she was kind of sassy.

Because of her upbringing, I believe, my grandmother was very quick to take offense. This trait seemed to become a bit diluted over the years and I think she began to cultivate some patience and tolerance with people, but I was always amazed at how much she could read into a situation where I would not have come away with the same opinion. Her early experiences really colored (sorry, can't think of a better word) the lens through which she viewed the world for the rest of her life.

I never had any doubt that I was loved. My grandparents' house (which we always referred to as "Grandma's House") was a place of order and calm, of fun and laughter, and a veritable cocoon of love against the chaotic home we lived in. Every single time we would leave the back door to go home, whether bundled up against the snow or heading out into a muggy mosquito-laden, sun-baked driveway, my grandmother would squeeze each of us tight. "I love you, love you, love you," she'd crow, every syllable dripping with affection, and we would yell back in a cacophony of squeaky shrieks how much we loved her as we were hustled into the car.

Tonight I apologized to Viva for not being myself, for yelling, for not wanting to play. "I'm just very, very sad," I said. She put her arm around me. "I know, Mom," she said. "I know how you feel."

Three Beautiful Things, March 24

2011-03-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

1. Orange gerbera daisies on my desk and a bright orange balloon tied to my chair by a co-worker. Leftover from a festive event yesterday, they keep the cheer going on a mainly overcast day.

2. The sky is blue, it’s gray, it’s white puffy clouds, it’s sunny, it’s rapidly darkening—reflective of my day, and almost following along with my moods.

3. Loving John Legend’s version of Nina Simone’s classic “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel To Be Free,” though I suppose you could read a lot into me listening to it on pretty much a daily basis as I’m driving to work. :-)

An Ill Wind

2011-03-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

My sister left me a message this morning that my grandmother fell. My grandmother is 85 years old and has stomach and lung and maybe liver cancer. She lives at home, with my mom and sister and family, and has refused all treatment except palliative care; a hospice nurse comes to bathe her and help with other tasks my mom can't handle. In the past week my grandmother has become increasingly disoriented and can't recognize certain people. They are theorizing that the cancer has spread to her brain. Her coordination has also fallen off dramatically--hence the fall. The decision has been made to bring in a hospital bed and have her sleep in the family room. She is taking liquid morphine and codeine and that's about all I know because my mom won't answer the phone right now.

Also today: my aunt emailed me that my stepfather, a recovering alcoholic with a host of medical problems, also fell and broke his kneecap. He is in the hospital and will need physical therapy and then substance abuse treatment.

In the meantime, all hell has broken loose in the Middle East and there has been that stupefyingly horrendous trifecta of the earthquake, tsunami, and near nuclear meltdown in Japan.

I know I am prone to exaggeration in the best of times, but life has taken on an apocalyptic tone of late.

Three Beautiful Things: The Ceeya Edition

2011-03-09T15:32:00.000-08:00

1. Ceeya slowly expanding the repertoire of things she will eat. In the past couple of weeks she has added French bread, plain spaghetti, broccolini, tater tots, and edamame beans to her list of accepted foods. Oh, and chicken! Which is huge, since really the only protein she was getting before was cheese, yogurt and occasionally peanut butter.

2. Rediscovering our creativity as a family. We have been singing together, dressing up and goofing around in a short film, and doing little crafty projects. We have been laughing a lot and recently Ceeya came up with her first joke:

Ceeya: Knock knock?
Mama: Who’s there?
Ceeya: Cowboy.
Mama: Cowboy who?
Ceeya: (singing) Na na na na na!

It makes no sense whatsoever, but we laugh hysterically every time she tells it because she cracks herself up. And that is some funny shit.

3. Hearing the true distress in Sweet Dub’s voice when he called me this morning during Miss Ceeya’s first official visit to her new preschool this morning. She starts there full-time in three-and-a-half weeks, so we are taking her to visit at least once a week to acclimate her. As previously arranged with the teacher, Sweet Dub left the classroom for 15 minutes and went to sit in his car—hence the distress call. “This is so HARD,” he said, anxiously. Evidently Ceeya wound up in a shrieking panic as she saw him walk out the door. I love him for being so distressed at her distress and calling me for reassurance.

(3.5. After the allotted 15 minutes, Sweet Dub returned. Ceeya was sitting on the rug for Circle Time, perfectly calm, and then burst into tears as soon as she saw him. He ended up sitting down with all the kids on the rug with Ceeya on his lap and singing along with their squeaky little voices for a couple of songs, which is an image that makes my heart explode. Then he and Ceeya packed up and left for daycare.)

(3.75. I will take pictures when I go with Celia to preschool, I promise. And I will actually put up a halfway coherent post about the whole preschool search, which was completely cuckoo bananas for a multitude of reasons.)

(P.S. Started this based on Three Beautiful Things, which I recently discovered. Hoping to make it a regular thing. Now you try it!)

I Am Not Trying to Break Her Heart

2011-02-15T15:10:00.001-08:00

Viva has been asking for a dog since she was 3 years old. For a couple of years there, she would ask for a dog pretty much Every. Single. Day. Finally, Sweet Dub declared that we would get her a puppy when she turned 8. At that point, he reasoned, she would be semi-responsible enough to handle some of the chores that come with having a dog, although he realized that We the Parents would have the bulk of the caretaking duties. Viva was satisfied with this, and at every birthday since, she has mentioned that she is one year closer to getting a dog. You know, in case we forgot.

You see the foreshadowing, right? Okay, moving on.

When we moved into our current house, we brought it up with the landlords to make sure they would be okay with us getting a dog. They were dog owners themselves and said that was fine. All was well.

We are now less than two months away from Viva's 8th birthday. And we also now realize we must move in September, if not before, since our landlords have moved back to CA and want their house back. I would hate to get a dog and then have to move into a place that's not pet-friendly out of desperation or financial necessity and then have to farm it out to relatives, or worse, take it to the pound. So here we are. For literally years, we've been planning to get a dog (or two) when Viva turns 8. I've imagined various scenarios via which we would surprise her, the joy on her face, etc., and dammit, just the plain fun of having a puppy.

It doesn't look like that's going to happen in the planned timeframe. It bums me out on Viva's behalf.

Also (and take with a grain of salt): the Experts say that you shouldn't introduce a cat or dog into the family if you have a baby or toddler. You should ideally wait until the kid is at least three to minimize the possibility of the animal biting an over-affectionate or not very gentle kid. So there's that then.

Keep in mind that my own parents promised me a dog for years. I actually got a puppy (the cutest thing EVER) when I was 11. My mom named her Jamocha, after her favorite coffee, but we called her Moki for short. I housetrained her, I walked her, I was actually pretty responsible with her. And then my parents decided she was getting too big for our (admittedly small) apartment and GAVE HER AWAY. I know the heartbreak and I can't do that to my baby.

(Even now as an adult, I understand why we couldn't keep the puppy but it still makes me furious that they would let me get a German Shepherd-Lab mix in the first place. You had to figure it was going to be a fairly large dog. But that's a psychological scab you don't want to pick at, so let's bury it deep once again and move on.)

I'm hoping we can put Viva off for a while (tell her she'll have to wait for now), get our housing situation settled, and then surprise her with a puppy at Christmas. Maybe.

(My puppy was so cute. She was black and tan and when she wagged her tail her whole body would shake back and forth. The first night she came home I slept snuggled up with her on the kitchen floor. )

What about you? Have you ever promised something to a child and then had to back off? Did you pretty much feel like crap? Discuss.

Now I Kiss You on the Nose

2011-02-14T14:48:00.000-08:00

Happy Love Day!

I am filled with love for you and the universe.

And yet I did not get you anything for Valentine’s Day. No roses, no chocolate, no extravagant jewelry.

Just love.

Here it is.

I didn’t wrap it, but I hope you like it anyway.

Love & kisses,
Mama Blah Blah

More Joy, Less Stuff

2011-02-11T16:36:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, I was working from home one day and my Internet service (which is very, shall we say, quirky, at best) suddenly decided it had had enough. Despite my best efforts, and a 40-minute phone conversation with my carrier (AT&T, whose customer service department truly must look like Outsourced), nothing would make it come back on. Well, what to do? I could get in my car and drive 25 minutes back to my office, waste time explaining why I was there, work for another hour and a half and then leave to go pick up Ceeya, or I could try and channel my rage constructively. I suppose there are a couple of other options—such as declaring the day a wash and either going shopping or lying on the couch watching DVDs and scarfing potato chips—but instead, I chose to tackle our home office.

I have to say, SOMEBODY in my house is completely disorganized when it comes to paperwork, and that SOMEBODY isn’t me.

Also: it seems we might need a shredder. There is a mountain (perhaps not a mountain, perhaps a small hillock) of paper in that room that we no longer need but cannot simply ~~throw away~~ recycle.

I’m not done, but I’m already feeling better about it.

Now as far as the Internet: still not working. I picture AT&T execs just sitting around on cushy lounges made of money, wearing T-shirts that say “Customer Service is for Suckas.” They probably smoke, too. And eat live kittens for fun.

In other earth-shattering news, the weekend has arrived. Enjoy it to the utmost!

I'm going to do something fun.

Digging Out

2011-02-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

First off, apologies for the misleading post title. It’s not about digging out from the snow, and as a native of New England, my sympathies to all of you out there across the land who are neck-deep in drifts and anxiously surveying the overcast sky. Believe me, more sympathetic I could not be. I’ve been there. Unpleasant.

No, what’s on my mind is digging out from under all kinds of clutter—emotional, mental, and of course, the actual tangible stuff that threatens to swallow my house. I’m on a simplicity kick for the new year. I haven’t made a resolution about it, since that’s not my thing, but I have this overwhelming urge to fix everything. You could read a lot into this. Here, I’ll get you started: my husband has been laid off now for ten months. We are fortunate that (a) he got a severance package; (b) he is eligible for unemployment benefits; and (c) we had a pretty good cushion of savings built up before this happened. We have been making it work. Every avenue that he has looked into in hopes of getting paid employment has taken far longer than we hoped. It doesn’t mean none of these leads will pan out ever; but it is stressful knowing that (a) his eligibility period for unemployment will run out in a few months; and (b) we are going to have to move out of our rental home in September and we had been hoping to buy a house at the end of this lease. Since our savings are dwindling, I can’t see how that would happen. The owner of the house, who moved out of state for a job offer, got laid off and now wants her house back (but is honoring the lease, so at least we have until September). Moving requires a significant outlay of cash, so I am not liking that. Oh, and (c) Miss Ceeya has to move from daycare to preschool. Still looking for a preschool and dreading the thought of having to put down a deposit. Keeping her out of childcare is not an option, as ironically Sweet Dub is busier now than he was when he had a job—he is literally working day and night on various projects he’s trying to get off the ground.

So things are feeling a bit out of control, and that is not a feeling I like all that much. Hence, the urge to undertake some project where I can create the illusion of some kind of order. I have been reading a couple of books lately about simplifying one's life and they are calming me down and inspiring me. Maybe at some point I will even review one (or both!) of these books here. Yes, that could happen. Anyway, moving on…

Is it wrong that one of the main messages I take away from both books (neither of which I have yet finished) is that I must cut the number of toys in my house by half? Is it also wrong that I hold in my head a completely unattainable vision of an organized, clutter-free home office/exercise room/back entry that doesn’t contain IKEA bookshelves, various pieces of sporting equipment and random power cords belonging to who knows what?

Now if only I could stay awake after the kids are in bed to get some of these projects going while simultaneously sublimating my anxiety…stay tuned.

Tired of Being Tired?

2011-01-24T16:46:00.000-08:00

Last week, I went to see my primary care physician because I’ve had a low-grade earache for a couple of months and it recently started becoming more painful. While I was there, we discovered through looking at my chart that I hadn’t been to the doctor in a couple of years. Indeed, not since 2008, when I went in ostensibly to deal with a lingering cold and ended up taking the pregnancy test that eventually culminated in the birth of Ceeya, who is now 27 months old. So you see, it had been a while.

My doctor recommended that I have a blood panel drawn since I hadn’t had a checkup for easily three years at this point. (I *have* gone to see my OB-GYN in that time span, so I am a little off the hook, but yeah, three years is pretty bad.) This morning she called to tell me that most of my bloodwork came out okay but that I have unusually low levels of B12 (the energy vitamin!), Calcium, and Vitamin D.

I have been falling asleep immediately after and sometimes during putting the kids to bed by 8:30. Sometimes I am sitting on the couch talking to Viva during the extra half-hour she gets to stay up past Ceeya’s bedtime, and I start falling asleep as she’s talking to me. I just figured I’m a working mom, I’m a little stressed, that’s normal. Hey, so guess what? Not so much.

If I can stay awake long enough to get myself to GNC, I’ll be back in the game, sports fans!

Moral of the story: take the time to listen to your body and take care of yourself! Too many of us are so used to taking care of other people that we don’t take the time to take care of ourselves. If I can’t be a role model to you, let me be a cautionary tale.

Finally!

2011-01-14T15:35:00.000-08:00

After a week of back and forth over whether we needed a referral for Ceeya and in what format, I finally cleared it all up and dropped by the Regional Center this morning. While I was expecting to just drop off Ceeya's original assessment, they asked me to sit and talk with an intake specialist. After a 20 minute interview during which she asked questions to which I did not know the answers (at what age did Ceeya sit up? Say her first word? Really? No idea. All I know is that she hit all major developmental milestones at the appropriate times, because our pediatrician would ask what new things she was doing every time we went in for a checkup, and she was right on track. I didn't write these things down in a baby book or commit them to memory and for that I felt the slightest tinge of guilt which I quickly got over. Ahem, anyway...) I say, after this interview, she set an appointment for occupational therapy with one of the actual doctors for 12 days from now.

So what I am saying is that the clouds have finally parted and it looks like we are actually going to get free (or at least low-cost, once they assess our insurance information) therapy to help Ceeya with her various issues.

If you felt the earth get about 800 pounds lighter this morning, that was the movement of the 800-pound gorilla finally getting off my back. How do you spell relief?

So here we are. In other world news, after trying since this summer (I simplemindedly declared August "the month of pasta," the more fool me) to get Ceeya to try macaroni or spaghetti or whatever, three days ago, she tentatively put farfalle pasta with butter and cheese into her mouth and declared it good. Since then she has been requesting pasta for lunch and dinner every day. So again, there is hope. Yeah, it only took her FIVE MONTHS to accept one new food (and I have not yet tried a different pasta shape, I'm just sticking with what works). Whoever tries to minimize the struggles we've been having with her can stick that in their pipe and smoke it.

So yeah, I'm feeling optimistic. And that's unusual enough that I have to point it out, somewhat tentatively because I'm worried I'll jinx myself. I'm halfway holding my breath.

One step at a time, chickadees.

The Present

2011-01-06T15:02:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

So far, this year 2011 has been very busy. We are almost a week into it, and it doesn’t suck exactly, but I was hoping for less running around like a rat in a maze for 2011 and more—I don’t know exactly, but more of things kind of going swimmingly well, with everything tinted in a kind of rosy backlit kind of way.

I am doing lots of things! Not really anything that is interesting, unfortunately.

I have been caught up in the swirl of the holidays and vacation and, back at work this week, we are preparing to move to a new office building 15 minutes away. There has been a lot of activity at home and at work and not much time for doing my own thing. My co-workers and I have been pranking each other and making snarky remarks about how we’re going to take over the new building once we move. My co-workers are a rowdy bunch. Every now and then we actually pack our crap into big black crates and slap labels on it. The move is allegedly happening tomorrow and over the weekend, and on Monday we are just supposed to show up at our spanking new offices and everything is going to work perfectly, forever and ever, Amen. I am skeptical.

At home, Viva is in her THIRD WEEK of vacation from school—curse you, Los Angeles Unified School District!—and Sweet Dub has almost certainly had enough of her. He has played Legos, and Bingo, and Monopoly, and scheduled playdates and sleepovers, and they have ridden bikes, and they have fought over the remote. When I arrived home last night he said defensively, “I haven’t been letting her watch TV all day,” even though I had made absolutely no such accusation. Viva was still in her pajamas at 5:45 PM. We were out of milk, and dishes were piled high in the sink. I took a deep breath and went back out into the night to the supermarket.

Our house is a wreck. But the kids seem happy to have had all this intensive one-on-one time with us, so much so that Ceeya won’t let me close the bathroom door between us.

Speaking of Ceeya: somewhat good news on the therapy front! I have contacted my local Regional Center and based on what I have told them it appears she is eligible for FREE services for her developmental delays. I must now get a referral from my pediatrician and/or the occupational therapist who conducted our initial assessment, HAND-DELIVER it to the Regional Center (tell me that will be easy) and then begin the nasty bureaucratic process—er, um, I mean, the exceedingly pleasant process during which I will run across happy government employees who will indulge my every request—of whatever I have to do to get her free therapy.

I have to say that Ceeya is doing much better on her social skills, somewhat better with her fine motor skills. Still needs work on depth perception and oral motor. Her food issues have seen no improvement. Somehow despite this she is growing like a dandelion. I include her hair in this characterization.

As for the title of this post: it is not a reference to a gift. It is a reference to what is happening now. Much as I resist New Year’s resolutions and their ilk, what I want to focus on this year is being present, as much as possible. Forget the dishes in the sink, forget all the stuff on the “to do” list, and give my attention to what is in front of me at any given moment. Easier said than done, but as 2011 motors along, I’m hoping I can retrain myself to do it.

P.S. I also want to cut down on using ALL CAPS in my posts. Rereading the post: what was the yelling for?

Holidazedly

2010-12-21T13:35:00.000-08:00

Feeling a bit grinchy today. Discovered that a package containing Christmas gifts that I ordered online was stolen from the FedEx station. Did FedEx call me to tell me so? No, I kept tracking it and was mystified that it had been “out for delivery” on the truck in Los Angeles for FOUR DAYS and yet not delivered.

I was tracking it rabidly because the box contained the Christmas morning “wow” present. You know the one, yeah, you know it. The one that you anticipate your kid’s head exploding with joy when she opens it? Yeah, that one. Naturally, it was not a small package. It contained three Razor Sole Skates for Viva and my two nephews. We are not doing a huge Christmas this year and I got a deal on these through painstaking bargain hunting online.

The good news is that Amazon is replacing them and rush shipping them to me at no charge. They will deal with filing a claim with FedEx and all that. Barring more delays from the weather (yes! Here in Los Angeles we are in the midst of a week-long deluge. Welcome to Christmas in Southern California), they should arrive on my doorstep tomorrow. I am tempted to stay home to insure they arrive and are not instantly carried off by a plague of pterodactyls.

In other world news, I am loving my kids right now. Ceeya is two, and what else need be said. She is fierce about her opinions, oftentimes to a maddening degree, to wit: We are in the car listening to music on the way home. She screams out, “Too youd!”

“Too loud?” I say, and obligingly turn it down a couple of ticks. She bursts into tears. After several stop lights of her howling with me asking different questions to determine what’s wrong while driving through the pouring-down rain in rush hour traffic, I finally come up with: “You said too loud, but do you want it louder?”

“YEAH,” she yells through her tears in that brokenhearted way kids do. I turn up the music.

“You need to say ‘MORE loud,’ not ‘TOO loud’ when you want to hear it better,” I say, as calmly as I can, considering that this type of outburst happens about five times on average between day care and home.

She sniffs. “Want juice,” she says. She is exasperating but so sweet.

Viva is amazing. We had a stellar parent-teacher conference. She is still consistently two grade-levels ahead of her grade and knocking the socks off her teacher with her kindness and willingness to help the other kids. Probably fodder for another post, but I am so thrilled with her transition to this new school. She has really come into her own. She is confident and happy and although we have our moments, most of the time she is such a cool person to be around. Our latest pastime is deconstructing Dora the Explorer (Ceeya’s new obsession) and laughing our heads off about how ridiculous it is.

It is a good time. This year has been a bit bumpy for us, but I feel like we are all doing well, considering, and are closer for it. I am looking forward to seeing what the new year brings.

In the very likely event that I don’t get back to the blog before the end of the holiday season: a belated Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Happy Kwanzaa and a very healthy and happy New Year to all!

The Preschool Search is On

2010-11-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

So the infant/toddler day care facility where Miss Ceeya frolics during the week has an age cap of roughly 2.5 to 3 years old. At that point you must get your kid the heck out of there. They don’t care where you go but you can’t stay with them—sort of like closing time at the bar, so to speak. (Not that I would know anything about that. And if I did, it was so long ago that it seems like a lifetime ago. Not that I’m old or anything. Wait, what was I saying?)

A couple of months ago, the lead teacher at the day care asked what our plans were as far as moving on. She gently mentioned that a couple of other kids around Ceeya’s age were already shopping around, and indeed, a couple of weeks before Ceeya’s birthday, two of them left for preschool. I started calling around and discovered to my shock that we are now at the point where there are already waiting lists. WHAT?

Well, you might say, why not just send her to Viva’s old preschool, and you would be right, except you don’t have all the facts, so you’re actually wrong. (I know, I know. Don’t get so upset, I can’t bear it.) Viva’s old preschool would be perfectly acceptable if: (1) we had two incomes; (2) it was anywhere near our current life, not a trek completely out of the way; and (3) Ceeya were a slightly different type of child. Viva loved preschool, but her preschool was very structured and traditional. Sweet Dub and I have been talking it over and thinking maybe we have to go Montessori with Ceeya. Not sure.

But you might say, why does Ceeya even need to go to preschool if her dad isn’t working? Can’t he look after her all day? I will say this to you: if I wanted him to never work again and also at the same time completely lose his mind, sure, he could be a stay-at-home parent. But I would like him to (1) have the option of taking a job should one arise (which actually looks imminent*) and/or (2) continue working on the film projects he has been doing while he is unemployed, because he is extremely talented and one of his projects is almost done. We are very nearly at the point where he could sell it and get distribution. This means he needs his days free so he can finish his project, work on the other projects he has in development and pre-production, and take meetings with people who can finance his production company. Following up on the numbered list from earlier in this paragraph, I would also like him to (3) be happy when he sees his family at the end of the day. He doesn’t do domestication very well. By this I mean he can do it—he cooks, he cleans, he changes diapers, and he kicks ass at all of these—but if he doesn’t have a creative outlet he goes cuckoo bananas.

I went on a preschool tour this morning at a place about 5 minutes from Ceeya’s current day care. It is a nice place, with a nice mix of kids (with our multiracial family, diversity is a plus and I am always looking for a place where one race doesn’t predominate). The teachers seem genuinely caring and the kids appear to be happy. They incorporate art, music and education throughout the day (basic numbers and letters), and the older group (age 4 and up) does simple cooking and computers once a week. They even have field trips occasionally. Monday through Thursday is a similar routine and Friday is a bit less structured. On Friday afternoons after nap time they watch TV because the main classroom is off-limits. The preschool is located inside a church, so they have to clean up that room as it is used by the church on the weekends. I am not clear why they can’t just do some other activity and I didn’t ask what they watch on TV, but once a week wouldn’t kill her, I guess. The monthly tuition is half of what I pay now, and less than half of what I would pay at Viva’s old preschool.

It was okay, but I didn’t LOVE it. I put our name on the waiting list as a safety and I’m going to keep looking. I have a tour with another preschool scheduled Monday. Stay tuned…

* Another conundrum, because he doesn’t particularly want a desk job, but in this economy, and with his film project not yet in the can, he is feeling pressure to cave and go back to working for The Man. While a regular paycheck is a lovely thing, I don’t want his soul to shrivel up and die. You see the problem.

Let's Go Ride a Bike

2010-11-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

Recently Viva was riding her bike around the neighborhood with her dad and she was coming down a hill and got nervous as she was going too fast. Instead of braking, she put her feet down, nicked one heel on a bike pedal, and then in reaction, leaned too far in the other direction and pretty much ate it on the tree she was trying to avoid. They were a couple of blocks away, but her leg was scraped up pretty badly and she wanted Sweet Dub to carry her home. (Oh, there were tears! And moaning! And he was so mean because he would not just carry her!) He reasoned with her that they couldn’t just leave their bikes on the street, so she had to tough it out until she got home. She recounted the whole episode to me while I washed her wounds, put her feet up on a pillow, and treated her to a Popsicle and uninterrupted Disney Channel viewing.

A couple of days later, Sweet Dub had her go back to the same spot and ride down the hill again. She didn’t want to do it, but he insisted that was the only way she would learn to navigate the situation. She came back very proud of herself for having conquered her fear of the big hill.

So you know when you've been away from your blog for a while and you don’t even know what to write about? You think, I just have to get back on that bike and write something, anything, any damn random thing. And then you do and you even connect it to something else that actually happened in your universe and you’re all like, well, that wasn’t so bad. And then you realize you’re kind of talking in the second person and that’s kind of annoying. And then you’re a bit peeved at yourself. And around we go.

I’m going to put it out there: I’ve been a bit depressed lately. And when I’m depressed, I tend not to write about it, because that makes me dwell on it and that is no good for anyone. And I hate using my blog as a dumping ground for this kind of thing.

And there is this thing, this NaBloPoMo? Which all of us who have been blogging for a while are well familiar with? If I were participating I would have posted something every day this month so far. I thought about writing something cheeky and subversive like, “I declare this to be NoBloPoMo” but what sense does that make, it’s really just an excuse to be lazy, yeah?

I’m officially back on the bike and I’m not making any excuses for myself. Hello, Internets! What’s happening out there?

She is Two

2010-10-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

Two years ago today, I was in the hospital having a wee little person removed from my uterus:

And these days, the paparazzi can catch her eating junk food and givin' folks the stink eye:

O Celia my love, how my adoration for you grows with each passing day. Now I must tear myself away from my computer and hie myself yonder to Ye Olde DayeCare, where lo! I shall distribute popsicles to many small people before taking thee out for pizza, which ye shall not eat. Many happy returns of the day.

Breaking Free

2010-10-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

Taking a break for the moment from the “all Ceeya, all the time” tone that this blog has recently adopted to get us all caught up on that other child of mine, Viva.

Viva is in second grade. She has moved seamlessly from the private school where she spent most of her weekdays between the ages of 2.5 and 7 to the public school right down the street from us. If you were me, you might have expected more drama. You might have agonized a bit over how she would do in this new school, this new environment, this new sphere. Would she make friends? Would the teacher like her? What if this were a complete disaster?

Honestly. I worried about the class size. She was moving from a school where there were 12 kids in all of first grade. I worried about the quality of the education. She is extremely bright, gets bored easily, and is used to getting one-on-one attention from the teacher. I worried that she would have trouble dealing with “regular” kids (whatever that means). You know, I just worried, because that is my nature and I am her mother and I want her to be happy and have a great school experience.

So: class size? She’s in a gifted/talented magnet so there are 16 kids in her class, not the 35+ I was having hissy fits imagining. Quality of the education? Because she is in the magnet program, she is surrounded by other kids who are quick and curious and as eager to learn as she is. Their teacher, who is happily back in the classroom after three years in administration, says, “These kids came in like it was March, not September. They were ready to go, and I love it!” She is getting to know each of the kids and tailoring different projects to their interests. She is as thrilled as I am with the small class size and getting to spend so much time with each kid.

Viva loves her teacher, her class, and her after-school program. So school is going way more amazingly well than I could have hoped. Since there is no drama in that, let us move on. Viva has also, over the past few months, undergone a radical transformation.

Perhaps you know that Viva is a tomboy. She is a tomboy to the extent that most of her friends up to this summer were boys. Had you asked me to describe her up to now, I would have said something along the lines of: she plays sports with a fierce competitiveness; she has a true disdain for fairies and princesses, dresses, and anything sparkly; she abhors pink. She likes to play with superhero action figures, and when she comes home from school, she strips off her uniform and pulls on a pair of boy’s basketball shorts. She may or may not wear a shirt. If she does, it will be a boy’s undershirt or an oversized T-shirt.

Over the summer, at camp, Viva had a gradual awakening, thanks to a group of knuckleheaded little boys at her camp. “Boys are stupid,” she told me. “And you know, I don’t think I want to be a tomboy anymore.”

I was blown away. I said, “Maybe some boys are stupid.* Some girls can be stupid, too. But don’t let the behavior of some silly kids make you change who you are. If you want to try being a little more girly, that is fine with me. It’s fine to try on different ways of being as you figure out who you are. I love you if you’re a tomboy, and I love you if you’re not.”

When we began back-to-school shopping, she indicated that maybe she’d be interested in trying on a dress. I ended up buying her several knit cotton dresses and leggings, along with pants and nice shirts. She also wanted sparkly low-top sneakers that lit up when she walked. Do you know that every day for the first week of school, my “tomboy” wore a dress and sparkly shoes?

Children are amazing. Viva is never boring. I love that I am here to buckle up next to her and marvel at her journey. And that still, so often, she is still badgering me to come along. The years move quickly, you know. Sometimes I miss her even though she is still here.

* The fact that she even uses the word stupid is incredible, since just a couple of years ago the word stupid was equivalent (to her) to using a “bad word.” My, how times have changed. How lazy I have become in my language policing.

Food for Thought (2 of 2)

2010-10-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

So here is the thing with Ceeya, as we call her. There are all these neat little boxes that “specialists” want to put her in. She has dyspraxia and neuromotor incoordination. She is oral defensive. She is a resistant eater. She needs helps with her oral-motor skills. She is tactile defensive. She needs help with her fine motor skills. I could go on.

I could. I could make myself crazy looking up stuff online (okay, so yes, done that) and reading books and articles until my eyes bleed (almost), and worst of all, feeling unable to share much of what we’re going through because (a) some people really don’t believe in all this mumbo jumbo and say, “there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just sensitive…she’ll eat when she gets hungry…you’re spoiling her.” (No, it’s true, some people say some bullshit like that. It’s astoundingly helpful, just as much as you might imagine.) Or (b) some people will really want to get all in your business and ask all kinds of questions, most of which are not really all that helpful, under the guise of being helpful. “Have you tried X?” they ask. “I heard that helps with autistic kids, my friend’s niece had a baby who had that.” As I prevent my head from exploding into smithereens via the sheer force of my will, I explain that Ceeya is not autistic. And as much as you are trying to help me, I am relying on paid professionals who, you know, have some kind of training in this area? To help come up with some kind of treatment? So as I do not run screaming off into the night?

I also steadfastly refuse to share this with my mother because inevitably she will latch onto Ceeya’s diagnosis and conclude that she has suffered from the selfsame thing for lo these 60-some-odd years, and that every bad thing that has ever happened to her can be traced back to it forever and ever amen and that it is too upsetting for her to deal with because it makes her think of bad things that happened 50 years ago and how things could have been different if only, so we should never speak of it again but recognize that she is suffering silently henceforth. Let it be stated for the record that I love my mother dearly, but: she has been known to try my patience.

I am tired. I have been dutifully taking Ceeya to occupational therapy once a week, which I now have to submit claims to my insurance company for and struggle to get reimbursed for. It is a dance that I never wanted to learn. We have been doing all kinds of activities with her—exercises to strengthen her grip, a vibrating toothbrush to desensitize her to oral stimulation, putting at least one unfamiliar food in front of her at meals and leaving it there even as she screams in horror. We play blocks with her, build Legos with her for fine motor coordination, bounce her gently on the bed to help with the vestibular issues. I know it will take time. It will take time.

Tonight around the Blah Blah Family table, we were building taco-burritos for dinner. Ceeya watched as we each spooned ground beef, and then rice with tomatoes, and then lettuce and cheese on our tortillas and rolled them up. She asked for rice, and lettuce. She carefully, methodically, spooned them out of the bowl and plonked them next to her shredded cheese. She didn’t eat them. She arranged them on her tray, and then asked for more.

This is nothing. At the same time: this is huge. She is playing with unfamiliar food. She is not eating it, but she has decided that it is not scary. It has a place on her tray, where the rest of her food goes.

It will take time. Lord, I am tired. But tonight, this one small thing made me happy.

Food for Thought (1 of 2)

2010-10-04T16:42:00.000-07:00

I have been doing a lot of work with Ceeya’s occupational therapist on her oral motor skills to try and find ways to help her learn to eat better. Aside from a lot of oral motor exercises (try and get her to eat applesauce through a straw, see if she can blow a cotton ball across a table faster than her sister, etc.) I’ve been doing a lot of online reading.

Just found two blogs about kids and food that I’ve added to my reader and I’m putting them out here for you to peruse and enjoy:

(1) Spoonfed
(2) Raise Healthy Eaters

More to come, but wanted you to know I haven’t run off screaming into the night. (Well, not permanently.)

Duh...Smartphone

2010-09-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty good week there where I posted something every couple of days, and then: I fell off the face of the earth.

Hello, and welcome to Monday. I am back, and not necessarily better than ever, but better than some days, which is better than nothing.

Quick update on Ceeya: her occupational therapist came down with the flu, so she couldn’t make it to what would be only our second session with her on Saturday. She emailed me on Friday to tell me this, rather than calling me, but since I was out of the office at an all-staff event all day on Friday, I didn’t see her email until Saturday morning, 45 minutes before I was supposed to leave the house. Fortunately, she had arranged for another therapist to take us at the same time. I was a little irritated because our appointment was for 12 noon—smack in the middle of Ceeya’s usual lunch/naptime groove—and she emailed to ask if we could do a 10 AM time just this once. That would have been my preference.

All this boils down to: I am really in need of a Smartphone, don’t you think? The more I think about it, I don’t even understand how I am functioning without one. Wait! Clearly, I am not functioning without one. I have my pathetic Motorola flip-phone and it is a piece of garbage. Wait, I didn’t mean that. It has served me well, but Ceeya threw it on the ground a few months ago and ever since then my screen has been badly cracked and I look like a total loser with my Fred Sanford phone. I have been waiting for my Verizon “new every two” deal to kick in—whereby I can get a new phone at a deep discount every two years—and that just happened last week. So I was merrily researching Droid Smartphones and mentioned to Sweet Dub that I was thinking of getting one.

Leave it to my husband to throw a wrench in the works. “Why don’t you just get an iPhone?” he said. “Maybe because I already have AT&T, we could get a deal and you could get the new iPhone 4. Maybe we could both get one!”

(Note that Sweet Dub was forced to buy a cell phone when he got laid off in April because his employer reclaimed the company cell phone which he had had for 6 years, thereby forcing him to switch phone numbers after 6 years, and by the way not letting him take any of his contact info off the phone, so he spent several laborious days emailing people and asking for numbers, oh my God, the humanity. At any rate, at that point, he chose the iPhone 3, and he LURRRVES it.)

I could be wrong, but I think it’s highly unlikely that we will have to pay less money for two new iPhones than for one Droid on the plan I already have, which will give me a substantial (read $300) discount on a new phone. Hence, this is all very pie in the sky.

You know those people they call early adopters? I am not one of those people. For many years, I thought the whole concept of every one having a cell phone was ridiculous. And even as a mom, who you’d think would be paranoid and need to have her phone with her at every moment just in case something happens to the kids, it took years—I mean seriously, only until the last year or so—for me to not leave my phone inside my purse, inside my desk drawer, and walk off to meetings and such for hours. I am just not all that plugged in.

Anyhoo: at some point in the next week or so, I expect to get a new phone and I will be up-to-speed for about five minutes until the next thing comes along. But most importantly, I will be able to get email anytime, anywhere, forever and ever, the end.

And maybe get all of my appointments synced up and know where I am supposed to be, with kids and without. That would be handy.

Chewin’ the Fat with Dr. Eats

2010-09-16T13:18:00.001-07:00

I met with a nutritionist yesterday to talk strategy for Ceeya's feeding issues. It was very helpful, and I walked out of there feeling poorer, but optimistic.

For one thing, the nutritionist (known henceforth here as "Dr. Eats") was very encouraging about what we are doing right, such as all eating together as a family at the table without the TV on, saying grace before meals (SPD kids need routine and ritual), and pushing fresh as opposed to processed foods as much as possible. She also liked that we are doing sensory activities that are related to food, such as putting uncooked rice and beans in a large Tupperware container, hiding small toys in the rice and having Celia dig through to find them, and "painting" with whipped cream.

Her primary concern as we talked about what Ceeya eats is that she's barely getting any carbs, since she doesn't eat rice, pasta, bread or potatoes (except in French fry form). So she wants us to begin trying to get her to eat those at every meal—to keep giving her the core foods she loves but also at each meal to offer a food she won't currently eat, preferably a starch. She made the point that when Ceeya rejects a food that she has been accustomed to eating, we should respect that, keep it out of her diet for a few days and then bring it back.

Interesting: when I told her of Ceeya's vestibular issues (i.e. she becomes anxious with unsteady or unpredictable movement), she asked whether she sits in a high chair. She does, so Dr. Eats suggested simply moving her to a child-sized table and chair, so her feet are firmly on the ground and she doesn't feel like she is floating in space. Despite the high chair having a platform for her feet to rest on, she may simply have issues with eating that far up off the ground. That had not even occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Other tips: make everything bite-sized and stick a toothpick in it. Since Ceeya hates touching things, she may be more amenable to eating food when holding it on a stick. (She certainly loves popsicles, so this is familiar to her.) Dr. Eats suggested making really tiny meatballs, cream of wheat "snowballs," and rice balls to be speared with toothpicks. Sweet Dub, ever the dedicated father, has declared Friday night "Toothpick Night," and claims he is making food the whole family can eat and it will all be on toothpicks.

Dr. Eats says we should make the most of Ceeya's willingness to dip things to get more protein into her—since she loves tortilla chips, she suggested pureeing black or pinto beans into bean dip, or making "baby" guacamole with mashed avocado and a little salt. She is already into dipping fruit into yogurt, so we will just continue with that.

Portion size is another thing. We don't tend to give Ceeya a lot of food at one time, because it overwhelms her and she will just throw it all off her high chair tray and look at us blankly. Dr. Eats said that even giving her a lump of mac and cheese is too much—we basically have to differentiate each noodle. "Pull out five individual noodles from the mac and cheese," she said. (Dear Lord.) Dr. Eats also suggested getting Ceeya more involved with food prep—for example, in making homemade chicken tenders. She advised putting cornflakes in a Ziploc bag and letting Ceeya bang on the bag until they're pulverized, then putting boneless chicken pieces in the bag and letting her shake it until they're coated. She can then watch me fry them. "Now, she may not eat them the first few times," she said. "In fact, you might have to make them that way twenty different times before she'll actually eat them. I'm not saying she's going to eat a new food tomorrow, but she may eat it in three months."

So, pretty much as expected, there is no quick fix. We're in this for the long haul, but there is at least light at the end of the tunnel.

And my little lambie pie is so worth it.

The Official Word

2010-09-14T12:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday when I picked Ceeya up at daycare, they told me she not only refused to eat her yogurt, but she had a complete meltdown about it. It feels like the range of foods she will eat is steadily shrinking.

Here’s the good news: I have a consultation with a nutritionist tomorrow. Cost: $175. That’s not so good.

But: we received our full evaluation from the occupational therapist. Verdict: Ceeya presents with an array of behaviors that indicate sensory processing difficulties, including:

Tactile defensiveness, which means her central nervous system has difficulty processing and modulating incoming touch sensations. She is averse to many textures including many different kinds of food. This has impacted her muscle development in her hands because she does not use them as effectively as she needs to manipulate and explore, so she is delayed in terms of grasp patterns and object manipulation.

Oral defensiveness, which makes her highly sensitive to tastes, textures and temperatures of food. She eats a very limited range of foods, primarily cheese, fruit, crackers, chips, and over time has actually decreased the foods she will eat, probably because she is bored from eating the same damn thing all the damn time. So now off the list are cottage cheese, yogurt (as of yesterday), applesauce, steamed green beans, broccoli and peas.

Poor modulation, which means she can’t self-regulate very well. She gets upset easily and can’t calm down, she has a hard time falling asleep, she is a restless sleeper and if she wakes up in the middle of the night she can’t put herself back to sleep. I am serious when I tell you that I have not had a good night’s sleep in over two years.

Over-responsiveness to sound, i.e. “kids’ birthday parties are my worst nightmare.”

Decreased vestibular processing, which means her awareness of where her body is in space is poor and unpredictable movement of her body freaks her out. This translates into her hatred of swings, not liking to tip her head back to get her hair washed, and an aversion to unsteady surfaces like a balance bridge or a large trampoline (she seemed to like the small trampoline at the OT center, which had a support bar she could hold with both hands while jumping).

So we clearly have some work to do. I am relieved that this is not just my imagination, or something she will grow out of on her own. I was really upset when I first read the report, mainly because of her fine motor delays, which I wasn’t even aware of. She has low muscle tone and decreased strength in her hands due to her tactile sensitivity. Rationally I know this is reversible, but it just hurt my heart to read it.

Recommendation: occupational therapy twice per week, as expected.

Current status: waiting for a phone call back from the head of the OT Center to discuss more realistic options.

A Grain of Salt

2010-09-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

This week I have been going back and forth via email with the very nice occupational therapist who is writing up Ceeya’s assessment. She cautioned me that because SPD is not recognized as an official condition and will not be until inclusion in the DSM-V in 2013, for now she is going to have to couch her observations very carefully in order to see if we can get full coverage for Ceeya’s therapy. For one thing, she is going to note things that I don’t think are an issue, like Ceeya not being able to put a wooden puzzle together correctly, as a fine motor skills delay. “Read it with a grain of salt,” she says. (I love salt! Salt N Pepa too!)

On the one hand, I appreciate this, as I do not have the fundage to pay for occupational therapy twice a week out of pocket, to the tune of $15,000+ per year (since that was her initial recommendation—a full year of therapy, sweet holy Moses. Have I mentioned that my darling husband got laid off in April and is still unemployed?). On the other hand, I’m not crazy about the idea of Ceeya being labeled with something she doesn’t have, and I worry about all sorts of “pre-existing condition” crap that might follow her forever. That does not float my boat, my friends.

If Ceeya did have some sort of fine motor skills problem, it goes without saying that I would want her to get some help for it. I am not THAT bad of a mommy. I think. But that morning was the first time, to my knowledge, that she had ever even seen a puzzle of that sort. The fact that she matched the shapes to where they were supposed to be, but didn’t actually press them in hard enough so they would stay there, indicates to me she didn’t fully understand the point of the exercise—not that she was incapable of doing it correctly.

Over the weekend, I bought a similar puzzle at Target which had more pieces and was labeled ages 3 and up (they didn’t have any which were labeled for younger kids, which is probably why Ceeya hasn’t encountered them before since she is not even 2 yet). Ceeya matched all the pieces perfectly but again didn’t push them fully into place. When I asked her to do that, she did, with a bit of frustration on a couple of oddly shaped pieces, but she figured out that she just had to move the pieces around a bit to make them fit. Now it is one of her favorite things to do.

This leads me to the official Blah Blah plan for handling our business, which boils down to this: we would rather fork out a few hundred dollars at the outset for sensory-stimulating and educational toys and play with Ceeya every day ourselves than pay out $1,200 a month to a twice-weekly occupational therapist and then fight to get reimbursed by the insurance company.

By this I mean no disrespect to occupational therapy as a profession. I realize neither Sweet Dub nor I are trained to provide OT, but surely there are ways we can work with the OT to reduce the time and cost and make it work for our family.

Stay tuned for next time, when we (hopefully) get the actual written report. What will it say? What does it all mean? Will I ever look at a wooden shape-sorting puzzle the same way? And will there be ice cream? (Highly doubtful, and perplexing.)

And So Our Long Journey Began...

2010-09-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

So we had Ceeya’s assessment on Saturday morning, and it was quite an experience. The Blah Blah Family arrived at the center on time, and sat in a very nicely furnished, sunny waiting area with lots of toys, books and puzzles. Ceeya and Viva immediately began playing together with one of those giant wooden activity boxes. Our assessing occupational therapist arrived and started us off with the paperwork. There was so much paperwork that Sweet Dub and I split it and continued working on it throughout the session. Much of it involved our own assessments of Ceeya’s sensitivities, but some of it involved very detailed questions about her birth and her developmental milestones. I honestly don’t remember exactly when she started doing certain things (the curse of the second child!) but I know that she has always been well within the normal range of physical development.

Anyhoo, we were there for well over an hour, and the OT tested her with puzzles, checked her muscle tone, tried to get her into a swing (which Ceeya was simply not having—she detests swings and almost anything that makes her unsteady. Oddly, she enjoys a rocking horse or a rocking chair), watched her on a trampoline, checked her balance on an exercise ball, watched her eat, had her use crayons and utensils, etc.

One thing I will say is that I was really surprised and proud that Ceeya pretty much took off exploring in each play room that we went to. (There were three successively bigger rooms.) This might have been because Viva was there with her and there were no other kids around, but still, I was pleased to see that.

We have not yet received the official evaluation, but the bottom line is this: the OT is not sure that Ceeya has enough “wrong” with her to be eligible for her sessions to be covered by insurance, and yet (yes, you knew this was coming) she would recommend therapy twice a week for the next year. She's pretty sure she has SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder), and that she's pretty much constantly in a state of "fight or flight," but yeah, probably our insurance won't cover it. Occupational therapy costs $150/session. Doing the math: that’s $1,200 a month.

Fortunately, I work for a children's social services agency and my bullshit meter was pinging off the charts.

Stay tuned for the next installment, when we take matters into our own hands.

Floundering

2010-09-02T14:44:00.000-07:00

Recently, I received confirmation that, much as I’ve suspected, Ceeya has a sensory processing disorder. We have a variety of problematic issues that have gotten progressively worse in recent months. I don’t talk much about that here, which is a shame, because it might help someone else who is struggling with something similar. But I feel that we are just getting started sorting out her issues and receiving treatment (primarily occupational therapy). It may be a long slog.

I’m teetering on the fence of how much do I share here. How much of this is really her story, but also about how this is such a small part of who she is. She is a sweet and smart and funny (yes, she already has a sense of humor) kid. I love her to pieces. I don’t want this condition to define her, but at the same time it occupies so much of my energy and brain space.

Too often these days, the things that are happening in my life are personal to many other people, and I don’t feel comfortable sharing so much about their lives. Again, rethinking what I want this blog to be.

Thanks for your patience as I sort this out.

Working from Home

2010-08-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when you are working from home all the planets align and even though you might occasionally stop working to throw in a load of laundry, you nonetheless are able to buckle down without the distractions of the "water cooler talk" and the like and you write something totally kick ass and you can actually check off a huge project on your TO DO list, a project which has been hanging like a millstone around your neck, like a big frickin' piece of granite or even a giant block of ice, whatever, it's heavy, dude.

Or sometimes, like today, you decide you will buckle down to work right after you make a big pot of coffee. But when you happily pull out the bag, it is suspiciously light, and you realize in horror you are almost out of coffee. And then you go searching through your freezer in hopes that a random bag of java might have fallen behind some tater tots (which you just mis-typed as tater tits, which is a bizarre notion in itself). And no, no hidden coffee, but then you notice that a bag of edamame beans was not correctly closed, and so there are assorted beans littering the bottom of your freezer, along with assorted coffee grounds. And of course you notice there are things in the freezer that are well past their prime, like pot roast that has been frozen for well over six months, so you go on a veritable freezer purge and a good scrubbing, and then you realize that you have just spent half an hour when you should be working, cleaning out the freezer. And the coffee still isn’t made.

And then you think this would be a funny blog post about procrastination, but then you think you don’t have time to blog, you have a grant to write, and then you promise yourself that if you buckle down and finish it, you’ll write the blog post too. And then you make the coffee and go out to the backyard and write out in the sunshine for 15 minutes so you get some Vitamin D and then you go back inside and type for 3 hours and finish the first draft of the grant and email it off and then boy howdy you feel pretty good about that, so here we are.

Happy weekend to you all, procrastinators and non.

Cuatrodos

2010-08-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

Hello!

I am forty-two years old today.

That is not so bad, right? It is better than the alternative, which is to cease to exist altogether. When you put it like that, it sounds pretty damn good to me.

Over the weekend, we were having some lovely, funky friends over, and I bought an assortment of beers because I was feeing a bit whimsical. Why not try different kinds of summer ales and such?, I thought. They might in fact have enjoyed some rum punch or something, but making some sort of rum punch was a bit beyond me. (They probably like punch. I knew I should have made punch.) At any rate, the cashier carded me. I almost wept, except that I was giggling a little bit. I thanked her and as I handed over my driver’s license as proof that I was of legal drinking age, I said, “I will be 42 next week!” I might have sobbed as I said it. Maybe not.

So here we are, forty-two. It honestly is not all that different from 41, or 40, or even 39, if you want to know the truth, and yes, I can remember that far back. The main issue of being 42, and it may not be related to my age, seems to be that I think I am going blind in one eye. My ophthalmologist can not seem to tweak my prescription correctly in my right eye, and so I spend my days tapping away at my computer with one eye closed in order to see correctly. Since I spend a great deal of time writing for my job, this is annoying. If I open my eye, it’s all blurry and I can’t read a thing. Not to worry, though, I can drive perfectly well! Take it easy out there, Greater Los Angeles!

Today I am looking forward to having Ceeya sing Happy Birthday to me on my actual birthday. She has been practicing the song every day for about three weeks or so. It sounds a bit different when she sings it, principally because she interprets it as “Appo DIRTday to you,” which I love, and I particularly love the way it sounds in the high-pitched gusto with which she sings it.

One final thing: In honor of my Dirt Day, and with a hat tip to Chad Ochocinco, I am changing my name for the day to Lisa Cuatrodos. Encantado.

Pampering Myself (and not with Diapers)

2010-08-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

I took a few days off a couple of weeks ago (calling it a vacation seems a bit disingenuous, since we didn’t go anywhere and since I spent most of it working hard corralling the kids without the help of my husband). On one of the days when Viva was in camp and Ceeya was at daycare, I took 3.5 hours at a new salon to get my hair colored. Call me shallow, vain, whatever, but baby, I felt like a new woman when I walked out of there. My new colorist, April, was sweet and down to earth and my hair looks exactly its natural color. I mean exactly.

My hair is very thick and resistant to color, so whenever I color it takes forever. Somehow she managed to cover most of the silver hairs that were cropping up (I did find a few strays here and there later) and she also managed to duplicate not only my natural light brown hair but also the lighter highlights that naturally occur. I’m not sure exactly what went down in the salon—I may have made promises I couldn’t keep, something about free tickets to the Cayman Islands or something, it’s all a bit foggy in my memory, but you know, whatever I said, she hooked me up and my hair looks better than it has in recent memory.

I was thinking, as I walked out, how difficult it is for me to do this kind of thing with any regularity, but how easily it made me feel better about myself. And feeling better about myself makes me better in every other aspect of my life (cue cheesy music here, I mean could I BE more predictable). Sorry for the cliché, but for reals, it’s one small thing that makes a big difference.

Take care of yourselves out there. Give pampering a chance!

Blog Angst

2010-08-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

Much has been happening in my personal life and I don’t feel I can share much of it here, although when I sit down to write, that’s all that’s on my mind. Then there’s the larger question: what is the purpose of me writing here? What or who is it for?

When I began blogging many years ago, I did so at the suggestion of some friends (Splooey and Mr. X, and they know who they are). “Blog? What’s a blog?” I said. They knew of my writerly ambitions and thought it would be a good way for me to get started writing regularly, with no pressure. Maybe they thought I would find my voice.

I like to write, and I like to make people laugh. I think I thought blogging might help me write some humorous essays, a la David Sedaris or something. Maybe. But all I know is I’m not feeling very funny these days, and I’m wondering if it’s because writing is an introspective exercise and when I take a half-second to get introspective, I get depressed.

But when there are these significant lapses between posts, a year later I look back and wonder what happened. Hence, I’m writing this so I can document where I am.

I am exhausted in just about every aspect of my being—physically (we just recovered from a family-wide bout with a nasty stomach virus), mentally, emotionally, the end. I no longer enjoy my work. I still enjoy my kids (most of the time). I miss Sweet Dub because he is in the middle of a manic creative phase right now, trying to launch a new career and get a TV project off the ground. My extended family is a huge mess and I’m trying to stay out of it. Work is really making me unhappy and I feel I have no options for fixing it.

It’s just a rough time.

Follow-up to this post: due to liability issues, one can’t actually tell this prospective employee that she needs to do something about her hair. Total can of worms, and what a shame. She was the top candidate for this job but eliminated from consideration for this one reason. (See the comments section for more info if you'd like.)

Can This Be Salvaged?

2010-07-13T16:36:00.000-07:00

Something has been weighing on my mind over the past week or so. I know of a situation in which there is a job opening and three candidates have been interviewed. Of the three, one clearly ranked above the rest in terms of experience and consensus was that this person was the most personable and all-around best fit for the position. The position was not offered to this person because of this person’s appearance. This person would be going out to meet with people to get them involved with the organization and it was unanimously felt that this person’s appearance (more specifically, hair) was unkempt and disheveled and that this person would not present well to the public for this reason. This person is warm, well-spoken, and passionate about the cause that they would be speaking about. Everyone who interviewed this person liked this person and wanted to hire this person. Everyone on the interview panel agreed that it was a shame they had to discount the person for this reason.

In this economic climate, I can’t imagine that this person (who, like the other two candidates, has been unemployed for some months) would refuse to do something about their hair if they really wanted the job. This is probably hindering their job search considerably, so even if they are offended that this criticism is made, it just seems the decent thing to do to let this person know what’s up.

The person who ultimately makes the hiring decision has been agonizing over this for the past week, particularly given that another interview was held yesterday and the interviewee was not anywhere near the caliber of the first person. The interview panel now compares every interviewee to the first person and finds them lacking.

The hiring person really wants the first candidate. If you were in the position of the hiring decider (just made that up) how would you handle this situation? If you were the really strong candidate who is being passed over due to your appearance, would you want to be told? And how?

Beach Blanket Blah

2010-07-06T13:31:00.001-07:00

Happy 6th of July. It’s chilly and raining here in Los Angeles. Maybe I should move to San Francisco?

Speaking of chilly, now that T-ball season is over, our Saturday mornings are free [That I even mention this tells you how enamored I am of organized sports and getting up and running out the door first thing on the first day of my weekend] and this Saturday, we decided to go to the beach. Some of us wore bathing suits with shorts and sweatshirts over them, while some of us decided why even pretend that we were going to get into the frigid and filthy Pacific. It was overcast, and “June gloom” (a weather phenomenon wherein Southern Californians wake to a morning cloud layer overhead which usually gives way to sunshine later in the day) has not been burning off until sometimes mid-afternoon, so we bundled up, threw all our crap into a wagon, threw the wagon into the back of the Jeep, and motored over to Santa Monica.

We arrived at the beach maybe twenty minutes later, removed the children and wagon from the vehicle, and trundled across the sand, where we staked out our spot. Let it be known here that the Blah Blahs are spoiled beach-goers, in that we generally go to the beach for only a couple of hours because we live close enough that it does not need to be an all-day affair. Also, we do not like crowds, so we like to get to the beach early, do our beachy activities, and then move on as the crowds start to arrive.

We laid out our blanket and promptly began building sand castles (Viva) and eating snacks (me) and placing teaspoons of sand into buckets (Ceeya*). We Blah Blahs are industrious folks. Sweet Dub sat in a beach chair and over the next twenty minutes or so, provided the following commentary:

Man, I wish I had a breakfast burrito right now.

Is anyone else hungry?

Man, it’s cold. I mean, it’s freezing!

Did you see that? Are those dolphins?

I’m wearing two T-shirts and I’m still cold. My feet are even cold. Are yours?

Man, it’s cold. This is really unpleasant. We might have to go home, guys.

So…I’m thinking we head out of here and go find a breakfast burrito. Anyone?

Honey, where was that place we used to go to that had those really good burritos?

Why are you laughing?

This is unpleasant.

Shortly after this we were treated to a gross display of extremely poor beach etiquette in which a family of five who were clearly from out of state arrived for their first look at the Pacific Ocean and despite there being very few people at the beach plonked their stuff down about two feet away from the people closest to us and then proceeded to yell back and forth to each other at great volume, from the water’s edge to the blanket to the teenage daughter who was hanging back near the car, a good half a football field away, draped in a blanket against the wind and the water spray.

Oh, dear Lord. I was fascinated yet simultaneously annoyed. I began to ruminate on the wisdom of posting some pointers at the beach, to wit:

First and foremost, most people go to the beach to relax and have fun. As much as possible, give your beach neighbors some space. This is easier when the beach is not crowded, but even when it is, keep at least 6 feet (i.e. one beach-blanket length) between yourself and the next group of people. We don’t want to know all your business, we don’t want to lie all on top of you, and we want some illusion of privacy.

If you’re going to play football or Frisbee, don’t do it right in the field of play. That is, don’t do it right at the shoreline, where people are entering and exiting the water and where people often like to take a walk. Sorry, but that’s unfair. Do it in the beach space behind where people are relaxing, i.e., furthest from the water.

Also, and this is related, don’t yell into your cell phone. Don’t blast your music. And for heaven’s sake, don’t set up your beach blanket and umbrella directly in front of someone who’s already sitting there. It’s rude. Finally, don’t smoke and don’t leave trash on the beach.

Whew, I feel better.

It's all a blur, but I think we lasted a full hour at the beach due to the cold and wind, rude beach neighbors, and lack of breakfast burritos materializing out of thin air. However, as I remember it, we nonetheless had a very nice afternoon chilling out in the backyard after the sun came out. I even seem to remember Sweet Dub later making a very scrumptious surf and turf dinner, so all was not lost.

* This is how our youngest says her own name. Since that is how Viva got her bloggy nickname, I am holding with tradition and will henceforth on this blog refer to Miss Celie as she refers to herself.

Wistfully, Summer

2010-06-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

Today I do not like being The Grown Up.

Today is the first day of summer camp for my little schnitzel with noodles, the All-Wonderful Viva.

Her father, the Ever-Amazing Sweet Dub, was a little concerned, I mean, curious, about how her day was going, and since he is not working, he thought he would sneak a peek a few hours in to see how she was doing.

Here is his report:

“I can see her right now, it looks like they’re just finishing lunch. She can barely sit still. She just jumped up and ran over to the counselor and I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she looks like she is really excited. She’s kind of standing on one leg and leaping around while she’s talking. Okay, he said yes to whatever she was asking and she ran back inside the gym all happy. So it looks like things are going well. You know, I can’t hear her but I know my baby. I can read her body language and it seems like she is pretty excited, so – oh, here she comes. She is sitting back down at the picnic table and it looks like she is doing some kind of art project.”

I wish I was doing some kind of art project. I wouldn’t mind an art project and maybe some kind of group game that involved kicking a ball and running and then having a cold beverage and a snack.

I loved camp. I loved the swimming, and the macrame, and making those plasticy lanyards, and playing soccer, and eating PB&J on the grass. And the smell of the grass, and the heat, and the sweatiness, and flinging oneself from activity to activity with total encompassing joy.

It’s hard being The Grown Up some days, is all.

First Post by Viva

2010-06-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

From Sweet Dub's iPhone, written on Memorial Day weekend:

I just went to the beach with my daddy and mommy I had a great time with my family we dug a tunnel we almost hit water my little sister is scared of the sand and dosnt want to put her shoes on I wanted to swing on the swings but my dad didn't let me so we had to leave good bye.

It makes me a little breathless, reading it, because there's no punctuation, but that is part of the beauty of it.

Find a Happy Place

2010-06-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

Sweet Dub is going out of town for a few days to do some filming. I miss him already. I really do! I have a lump in my throat and it’s been about 6 hours. That’s kind of ridic, but as Woody Allen once said in far ickier circumstances, “The heart wants what it wants.”

In the meantime, I will be working on Celie’s food aversion and social anxiety*, corralling kids before and after T-ball (it’s Team Picture Day on Saturday! At which time we will be asked to cough up an obscene amount of money to get a picture of our kid with her team and her very own personalized baseball trading cards with her picture on them! Remind me again why we are doing team sports?**), attending two Sunday birthday parties which are being held at exactly the same time, and trying to meet multiple deadlines at work. It is time to put away childish things like coffee and invest in some Red Bull. Or maybe just step it up to espresso, no?

Work is kind of sucking right now. The deadlines seem to be reproducing and as they do my Malaise seems to be trying to keep up, followed closely by Eye Strain and Headaches, both of which seem to appear within an hour of my arrival at work. I have not had a vacation this year (woe is me), and I am not expecting to get one now until September. Feeling very ground down and unappreciated, whiny whiny fiddlesticks.

P.S. I have officially hit the wall on the third of eight projects I am working on. Well, I cleared my desk of two projects this morning, so I am actually ahead of schedule. When does THAT ever happen, I ask you?

P.P.S. Bizarre interaction of the day: an older white male co-worker telling me, “You da bomb!” What?! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

* I expect to have both of these completely under control by the time her dad gets back on Sunday. I believe this falls under the category of “if you can believe it, you can achieve it.” In reality, I am hopeful that I can get her to accept one new food this weekend. Baby steps, as They say.

(Have been doing some research on food aversion and have discovered that Celia has what is called food neophobia, i.e., a fear of any new foods. [This flabbergasts me, since I am pretty much game to eat anything and that was the expectation in my family of origin, in which my sister and I gained reputations as “picky eaters” because she would not eat lima beans and I would not eat raisins. Honestly. We would both eat all kinds of things that other kids wouldn’t eat, including Brussels sprouts and beets, and yet we were stigmatized. My family is a piece of work.] This goes beyond being a picky eater into total freakout territory. Whee, fun times.)

** I am so not a joiner of anything. Slacker, thy name is Lisa.

The Dangers of Cloning

2010-05-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

If you were a fly on the wall, yesterday evening you would have seen Sweet Dub embrace me in the kitchen, after which the following exchange took place:

Sweet Dub: I love you so much, I wish there were three of you.

Mama B: What would you do with three of me?

Sweet Dub [clearly he has a plan]: One would stay home and take care of the kids. One would have a high-powered job to keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed. And one would be devoted solely to me.

Mama B: I see where you’re going with this. So that last one wouldn’t have to do all that much except work out, take care of your…bedroom needs, and go shopping?

Sweet Dub: Shopping?! Shopping for what?

Mama B [thinking "arm candy"]: Lingerie, and clothes—

Sweet Dub: Why would she need clothes?

Why, indeed.

Kinky

2010-05-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

Hair style is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself.
- Hubert de Givenchy, Vogue, July 1985

I think I need a haircut.

My hair is getting really long and I’m tending again toward my cop-out hairdo of pulling my wet hair into a simple ponytail and letting it air dry on my way to work (which it doesn’t, because I have really thick hair). As Viva says, “That is not a hairstyle, Mom.”

What a journey my hair has been over the years. I know that many women agonize over their hair, but the journey seems particularly fraught for those of us with super-hyper curly hair—and those of us whose ancestry has at least some passing acquaintance with Africa get the double whammy of having hair that is simply not a part of the mainstream standard of beauty.

My guilty pleasure (well, one of them) is watching What Not to Wear. But after watching it for a while (and honestly I watch it much less than I used to—I watched it every morning when I was on medical leave a couple of years ago), the segment where they would do the hair makeover started to bug me, because invariably whenever they came across someone with curly or even wavy hair, they would blow it straight. “Sleek and sophisticated,” they would gush.

I call bullshit on that. You mean you are going to teach someone how to completely change their wardrobe to look better and feel better about themselves, but you are going to tell them that the way their hair looks growing naturally out of their heads is not okay? It’s perplexing, because so often hosts Stacy and Clinton preach the message of fit: know your body, accept the shape you have, and dress to compliment your unique shape. They never say you have to lose 50 pounds, or your legs are too short, or your shoulders are too broad. They’re all about working with what you have. And then the hair stylist comes in and gives the woman straight hair. I say: teach them how to style their curls! Teach them to love their hair as it is!

I digress, but only because it is related to my personal hair mantra, which is: It’s all about self-acceptance. And again, working with what you have. When I was a kid, my mom got so frustrated with trying to braid my hair that when I was about 9, she finally just cut it all off—without even asking me first. I then got mistaken for a boy all the time for a couple of years there, because she kept cutting it. This actually was fine with me most of the time because I was a total tomboy, climbing trees and playing Six Million Dollar Man, and I wouldn’t wear a dress if you paid me.

When I hit middle school, my hair had grown out enough that I went back to having a wet set (ecch, can you imagine) every Sunday. By high school, curling irons were it. My hair might not be straight, but at least it was in smooth, big curls. Near the tail end of high school, I cut it all off very short and wore my hair natural in a light brown/dark blonde afro and since it was the 80s, with very thick blue eyeliner. Oh, my.

By the time I hit college, I’d discovered relaxers. No one in my family ever used them, so I had no personal experience with them. I never thought they would work on my hair, but at some point a friend suggested I use one to texturize my hair, so it would still be curly, but grow down, not out. I used them with some success throughout my 20s. During this time, people would tell me how gorgeous my hair was. Are you kidding? Never in my life had I ever thought my hair was pretty. And here I was, with this giant curly head of hair, learning how to use leave-in conditioners and actually enjoying how my hair looked, floating halfway down my back.

By the time I hit 30, I was very happy with my hair and stopped relaxing it. I also became something of a hair product junkie and began falling in love with sites like nappturality and naturallycurly.com. One day, I was walking down Robertson Blvd. in Beverly Hills and a man in a convertible flagged me down. He complimented me on my hair and in the same breath said he was looking for models to be on a show about a Japanese hair straightening system. Would I be interested?

“How long does it last?” I asked.

“About six months,” he said.

“Even when you wet it?” I said.

“Yeah, you won’t believe it,” he enthused.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m all about the self-acceptance.” And I kept walking.

All about the self-acceptance…except, it seems now, when it comes to white hair.* Get me to a colorist, stat!

Apparently I’ve still got some work to do.

* I’m not going gray, I’m going white. I think it’ll look cool when I’m 50, but I’m not there yet.

Changing the Paradiggum

2010-05-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

There was this commercial several years ago in which a bunch of people are sitting around in a conference room and one guy is all gung-ho and trying to get everyone else on board and he says “Sometimes you have to change the paradigm [which he pronounces paradiggum]...think outside the box.” And that has become part of the Blah Blah family lexicon, that “changing the paradiggum.”

And yet fixing one problem sometimes creates another.

Case in point: Miss Celie has been having sleep issues for some time. A (not so) brief history:

Stage One: We started out as co-sleepers. This was very sweet when she was an infant. I would just scoop her next to me and we would sleep with our heads close together all night long. I set up the Co-Sleeper next to the bed, more as a bed rail than anything since she didn’t actually sleep in it, and I slept in between Celie and Sweet Dub. This worked just fine until…

Stage Two: At some point she learned to roll over and keeping her on the side of the bed, even with the Co-Sleeper, wasn’t working. Sweet Dub was no longer worried about rolling over onto her and squishing her in the middle of the night, so we would then go to sleep with her between us. This worked for a very short time, because:

Stage Three: She began crawling and then walking, and would practice in her sleep, flopping around and kicking Sweet Dub in the head. He would wake up, irate, and stomp to the couch and sleep there for the rest of the night, while I would sleep like a rock, oblivious. Not very fair to him, and yet because she was still waking up to eat in the middle of the night, I was too tired to do all that much about it. However, eventually we moved on to…

Stage Four: We’d put her into her crib in the room she shared with Viva at the beginning of the night. At some point she would wake up, I would feed her and/or change her, and because she is a high-need baby (read: loud), I would have to remove her from the room so as to allow Viva to get some sleep. At that point I was so drunk with sleep deprivation that I would stumble to the couch and lie down with her there or just take her back to bed with me. In the latter case, within 30 minutes or so Sweet Dub would get kicked in the face, exit the room and go back to the couch. And I would continually wake up because I was getting kicked and banged into by my very active sleeper. All was not well in Blahville.

Stage Five: Last week, we committed to sleep training Celie and moved Viva across the house into her own room. Bought a rocking chair and hunkered down to battle. The first two nights were rough. She woke up every couple of hours howling. But then…the heavens parted and the sun shone down and she began sleeping through the night. Regularly. For the first time in her nearly 19 months of life.

And now, we are paying the price. She is furious with me. She follows me around screaming at me. She cries, she throws things, she hits. I was reading a pamphlet yesterday for something I’m writing for work and I came across a list of typical behaviors for young kids who have experienced trauma (I am not making this up):

Difficulty sleeping
Excessive tantrums
Defiant, won’t cooperate
Difficulty staying still
Aggression or acting out
Depression or anxiety
Low self-esteem
Inability to trust others
Separation anxiety
Cries a lot and won’t be easily consoled

I could put a check mark next to almost every single one of these. And last night I had to go to an event after work and didn’t get home until after she went to bed. This morning she was a mess, falling apart every five minutes and screaming when I put her in her car seat. At day care, she was fine sitting on my lap on the floor as I talked with her caregiver. I asked if she had been acting out at all. No, she is as she has always been at day care – she’s one of the easy ones, they wish they had 15 kids like her. And then when I got up to leave, Celie fell to pieces. She clung to me screaming. All of the teachers looked shocked. “I’ve never seen her like this,” said her beloved E, who has been her primary caregiver from the beginning. She had to pry her away from me and walk outside with her to wave goodbye. It was not a good way to start my day, to put it mildly.

So I get it: Celie misses her mommy. A lot. And it makes her angry and sad. We have been very much on the go these days, even on weekends, what with T-ball games and birthday parties and going up to visit my ailing grandmother. Celie’s not getting a whole lot of one on one time, and now she’s not even sleeping with me. Where we used to wake up all snuggled against one another and she would pat my face and give me kisses, now she wakes up alone. One of us goes to get her and cuddle her immediately, but it’s still a loss.

And now I have written this epic post, is there a resolution? Sleep issues solved, separation issues drastically heightened. There are no easy answers except take some time off and be with her. This, during a busy season at work when my husband has just been laid off. I need my job. But my baby needs her mama.

For the record: I know I am a good mom. I know I am doing the best I can on this hamster wheel of modern life. Today I am buying a lottery ticket and hoping for the best. Maybe I could stay home with her for a while.

P.S. She is very sweet when she's not mad at me:

Blog Neglect

2010-05-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

Blog neglect, n. That state of inactivity on one’s blog that makes all regular readers forget that one ever even had a blog. Also, the related malaise that leads to complete inarticulateness when one actually does sit down to write a post

Here is what I must do:
Set a regular schedule and stick to it. I’m aiming to blog Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

And…I got pulled away from this while writing and almost forgot to post it. Ah, the irony.

Good Times

2010-05-12T16:24:00.001-07:00

Yesterday Sweet Dub and I met for lunch and inadvertently celebrated an anniversary: it’s been a month already since he got laid off.

I know! Doesn’t life always fast forward at the worst times?

At any rate, it was kind of a fun lunch. Laid-back, and Sweet Dub was dressed all casual and hip, wearing a new hat which makes him look even more like his doppelganger, Mos Def.

(Hm. Inserted a picture here of Mos Def in hat. Blogger will not recognize. What the fizzle?)

We talked about current events and other things not related to the kids. We ate Italian food and shared coffee afterward. It was kind of like being on a date.

We are working on a couple of creative projects together—well, mainly he is working on them, and I am trying to do my part in my spare time, and telling him whether I think this or that is a good idea, and helping with logistics when I can. And in this way, I think, the lay-off has been a good thing.

He is simultaneously happier, and a little stressed out, and excited. It’s an interesting, unpredictable chapter in this life we are building together.

That said, more to come…

Too Many Cooks

2010-05-06T12:25:00.000-07:00

It is never simple here.
Everybody has an opinion.
A brief piece which is time sensitive is held up.
Repeatedly.
Because so-and-so has to review.
And then whats-their-face needs to read it.
Please say This and not That.
Take This out.
We can’t say That.
I find out that This is also politically sensitive.
In the sense that if we say This, we might not get That.
This could cause big problems for us.
Did he say you could say That?
I am tired and cranky and sick of this game.
Write it yourself then, I think.

It is just this moment.
Tomorrow or even an hour from now I will feel differently.
Inhale, exhale.
I go play with the kittens that were rescued from inside the wall while a crew was renovating an office.
They are tiny, and wide-eyed, and full of beans.
How can you not smile when watching them?
I defy you.

There’s Nothing I Hate More Than Nothing*

2010-05-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!
- Richard Bach

When I first read this quotation I misunderstood that second part. I thought it meant, “There is no such thing as the worst thing that could happen to us.” Maybe it was because I hadn’t had my coffee yet.

But what he’s saying is that the worst thing that can happen to us is that nothing happens to us. And that, yes—that I agree with. How are you to grow as a person if nothing happens to you? Think of how much all your varied life experiences have shaped you--whether for good or bad. They are what make you so distinctly yourself.

Similar wisdom from another and very different source:

Just because it's different, doesn't mean it's scary...try new things!
-I'm From Barcelona, on the Yo Gabba Gabba! Music is Awesome CD

* Showing my age! Can you guess where the line comes from?

Acceptance

2010-04-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

Just a quickie:

Catching up on my blog feed reading, and I came across this little gem which had me nodding my head. In it, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits reiterates what has been floating through my mind since Sweet Dub got laid off: in essence, this too shall pass. This happened to us, and it was neither good or bad, and something else will happen tomorrow, and that too shall pass. And life will go on.

“A weed is only a weed when we don’t like it. Children are only naughty if we don’t like their actions. Life only sucks if you judge it as bad.”

This is very hard for me, this dropping of judgment and expectations. Very, very hard. But it’s a great exercise in retraining your brain.

Back from the Doldrums

2010-04-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

Well! I just dropped a bomb on you and then skedaddled away, even though so many of you so kindly took the time to comment and commiserate.

That’s not cool, and I apologize. What’s happened is that Sweet Dub got laid off and that very same day, our modem decided to die. What with one thing and another (oh, the intricacies of health insurance and COBRA and such, and by the way: SUMMER CAMP! You gotta start thinking about it! And by the way: cell phone! Sweet Dub’s was a company phone, so he suddenly didn’t have one and lost all his contacts! And hey: pinkeye! The baby got it! And T-ball! We are smack in the middle of T-ball season! And sickness! Sweet Dub and I are both neck-deep in phlegm! And exhaustion! And, scene.) – well, what I’m saying is, I’m pretty invested in keeping my job right now, so I’ve not been blogging at work, and I’ve had no Internet access at home, and I don’t have a Smartphone, so I’ve been somewhat off the grid in terms of blogging.

But here we are, and ten days post-layoff, we are managing to stay positive. I am trying to avoid thinking about health insurance because it makes my eye twitch, so I won’t go into that, but just know this: the Blah Blahs can’t ever catch a break with something like that. Every avenue I tried came back to this: I must pay through my employer for health insurance, and it is $1,100 a month. COBRA is not cheaper, and we don’t qualify for the federal subsidy because Sweet Dub is eligible for health insurance through my job.

But enough about that. (Already I can feel my blood pressure spiking and my heart rate increasing, just in writing those few sentences.) At least one of us has a job. And we have some severance pay and we have some savings (partly for the hypothetical house which is impossible to buy in Los Angeles anyway) and if worst comes to worst, we have credit lines that are not being used. But I would hate for it to come to that.

Here is where I should insert something pithy and somehow poignant and inspirational. But instead I want to tell you a silly story, because it’s finding the humor in the everyday that’s keeping me going right now, and maybe it will make you laugh, too.

Earlier this week, I discovered that if I said, “Ready, set –“ to Miss Celie, she would say, “GO!”* But she would say it with such force that she would literally rock forward on her toes and the vein in her neck would stand out. And then she would break into a huge grin, as pleased with herself as could be.

Last night, I was talking to my mom on the phone and I figured this was a perfect “show off to Grandma” moment, so I said to Miss Celie, “Ready, set –“ and she said, “No.”

Ready, set – NO. It’s kind of appropriate, I think.

* And she doesn’t pronounce it plainly, “GO,” it’s more like “Goh!” which for some reason is more endearing and harder to convey on the page.

Holy Crap

2010-04-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sweet Dub just called me. He got laid off today.

Holy freakin' crap.

Seven

2010-04-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

It was a Tuesday morning. Sweet Dub was working horrific hours at his job. When he left for work at 6 AM, he asked if I was okay. My hips had begun hurting pretty bad at about 4 AM, but I said, “I’m fine, go to work.” And then I said, “But if I call you and ask you to come home, it’s not an April Fools!” and I went back to sleep.

About an hour later, I woke up with the distinct feeling of being wet. “The final indignity has happened,” I thought. “I’ve peed myself.”

I hefted myself out of bed and padded into the bathroom, where I peed again. As I was washing my hands I felt like I was peeing on myself again. I could feel fluid running out.

“Did my water break? I think my water broke,” I said out loud to no one in particular. “Is that what this is? This is not what I thought it would be.”

And, seven years later, that pretty much sums up my journey of motherhood. It is not what I thought it would be. It is so much more of everything, I can’t even explain it.

That day, my life changed forever. At 7:22 PM, Viva rocketed into the world.

A few hours old

A few weeks later

And she’s been rocking my world ever since. But enough about me, because after all, it is her birthday. Here are her specific birthday instructions/requirements:

(1) I must sleep with her, in her tiny little bed, so we can wake up together all snuggly-like
(2) She does not care what she has for her birthday dinner, as long as there is cherry Jello for dessert
(3) She is having a class field trip, so no party at school (huge sigh of relief here)
(4) HOWEVER, she is inviting her entire 1st Grade class over to our house for a party next Saturday (insert nervous breakdown here)
(5) She must also sleep over at Auntie Lola’s Saturday night, so as to wake up at her house Sunday morning for an Easter egg hunt and thus, maximum birthday/Easter-type leveraging of wonderfulness

Ah, my girl. Was there ever one so amazing and superb? Her legs are ten feet long and she can tell you the plot of every SpongeBob episode EVER and sometimes she still does that thing where she says, “Remember when--?” and it’s about something that happened when I wasn’t even there, but she always assumes I am with her, all the time. It’s like she thinks I can see everything she is doing. Not quite in a creepy way, but like we are so connected that I must be able to see everything she does even when I’m not there. Like we are twins or something.

She is slow as molasses on a cold day, and quick as a whip, and all other kinds of similes and metaphors that I won’t bother employing here. She wants to be like all the other kids, and at the same time she wants to be different, and I get it, I really do. She is a complex little person. The other day she said:

“Mom, Ms. C only lets me get CHAPTER books out of the library.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m the only kid that has to read chapter books. No one else has to read chapter books.”

“I thought you get to choose whatever book you want,” I said.

“No, Ms. C picks our books,” Viva scowled. (Actually, I believe the process is that the teacher has to approve the books they’re checking out.)

“So what’s wrong with chapter books? Is she picking ones that are too hard for you?”

“NO,” Viva said.

“It’s just that you’re the only one who’s reading them?”

“Yeah,” Viva said. “The other kids get the easy books.”

I finally realized that she thinks the teacher is being hard on her, rather than recognizing her skill level and having her read what’s developmentally appropriate. I then tried to explain to Viva that it’s because she is so good at reading that Ms. C gives her the more advanced books, because she might be bored with the easy books. Viva was still skeptical, and still kind of pissed at being labeled different in some way, even though it’s because she is way beyond her grade level.

She has an innate sense of fairness, and she really could not give a damn what she looks like. Except she better have some cool sneakers on. If she could wear whatever she wanted every day, it would be basketball shorts, a T-shirt and some badass Adidas. She protests having her hair “did,” but refuses to get it cut. She loves the way her hair looks right after she gets out of the shower, and right after it’s been oiled and braided. She has a much higher tolerance for fuzzy edges than I do, and ducks when I try to swipe at her hairline with a brush in the morning.

She hates it when she is not excellent at something the first time she tries it. I mean, she hates it to the point where she will burst into tears and throw a racket down and say, “Tennis is so STUPID anyway!” I mean, like in the moment if she could she would take a flamethrower to the tennis racket, the tennis ball, and all of Wimbledon, Serena Williams be damned. I know that it is only time and a moderate level of maturity that make me a bit more mellow about things like this than she is, but at the same time, it is exasperating.

Three weeks later, she will be bouncing a tennis ball with her racket like she is a pro, rage forgotten. She is a tough cookie, and still a little girl who screams for her parents in the night when she has a bad dream. The Tooth Fairy is no fiction to her. Yesterday, we had a serious conversation about cartoon duck voices (from Donald Duck to the baby duck on Tom and Jerry, we covered the whole pantheon).

She is so distinctly herself. I really lucked out. So happy birthday to Viva, my sweet, smart, ever-growing knockout of a girl.

Sleep: The Last Unicorn*

2010-03-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.
- Leo Burke

I was reading about sleep deprivation last night. And although I was reading a book** about child development, the book mentioned as part of its chapter on children and sleep that studies performed on adults who were averaging about 6 hours of sleep a night functioned similarly to individuals who had not slept in 24 hours.

I can’t remember the last time I had a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. I feel that I am irritable, prone to weepiness, and not ever functioning at optimum capacity. Not surprisingly, it’s not a good feeling.

One of the best ways, I have read, to ensure that you get enough sleep is to establish a bedtime for yourself. Before I became a parent, I pretty much just went to bed whenever I felt sleepy. This meant that some nights, I could get ten hours of sleep, or, if I was feeling particularly peppy, that I could stay up late and get by on five or six hours. Right now, with my sleep debt, the concept of eight full hours of sleep seems like the most heavenly thing imaginable. I told Sweet Dub last night that we need to get to bed by 10 PM. He thought that was really hilarious, and not really helpful, since we are being awakened every night in and around the 2 o’clock hour by Miss Celie. It takes at least 20-30 minutes for her to get back to sleep in the middle of the night, so even so we will not get a full eight hours of sleep.

We are the Crabby Blah Blahs. Hear us whimper.

P.S. it looks like Miss Celie may have another ear infection, so we’re heading back to the pediatrician this afternoon. (The screaming you hear is just inside my head.)

* By which I mean: it's rumored to exist, but has proved elusive. Have you ever read that book? I went through a Peter S. Beagle phase when I was about 15, but that is a tangent which I am cutting short --hmmm, right now.

** The extremely popular NurtureShock! Read it and weep! No, actually, it’s really fascinating, in the “I know I should go to bed but I just got sucked in to read the next chapter” kind of way. It pokes holes in a lot of assumptions we have about modern parenting. I’ve been wanting to read it for months, was waiting for it to come out in paperback, and finally just gave in and bought the hardcover. I regret nothing!

Skinny Mini

2010-03-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

At our last pediatrician visit a couple of weeks ago, we discovered that Miss Celie had a “raging” ear infection (the doctor’s words, not mine), and that although she’d grown two inches since her last checkup five months ago (yes, we’re off schedule), she actually weighed less at 17 months than at 12 months. I know Celie is a horribly picky eater, and I had been dreading the appointment, because the list of foods she will eat is quite small, and lately she had begun rejecting certain foods that she previously would eat.

Dr. H said we might need to take her to an occupational therapist to work on her food aversion. (This is an actual thing, this food aversion!) But then she conferred with one of the other doctors in the practice and they came up with a plan whereby we are to offer Miss Celie food once an hour while she is awake. We are only to offer her foods which she actually likes, although they do want us to try giving her PediaSure or Carnation Instant Breakfast as a supplement. (It turns out she hates PediaSure and will only tolerate about one tablespoonful of Carnation Instant Breakfast in her milk.)

If she doesn’t gain weight on this plan, by April 21st, they will send us to jail. No, no, I kid. They will refer us to a nutritionist and possibly also an occupational therapist, who will re-teach her how to eat. (I am serious.) I don’t know if this comes through in my regular blogging, but we are actually pretty healthy, balanced-meal eaters. Viva has even commented that her teacher says she is the only kid who brings healthy snacks to school. (That is rather alarming and fodder for a whole post of its own.)

We are educated, middle-class, blah blah blah, which I hate even writing, but I feel like we have all the tools at our disposal for our little one to be healthy and flourishing. Is our kid failing to thrive? In all honesty, I walked away from the appointment with a giant lump in my throat, feeling like a terrible parent.

Sweet Dub’s reaction was similar: “I feel like we let her down,” he said.

Celie doesn’t look underweight. She has a layer of baby fat, and she has curvy little arms and legs. She has a little potbelly, as most healthy kids her age do. She isn’t fat, but her genetics are going to predispose her to that. Sweet Dub and I were both skinny kids and we are not large adults.

She’s also been teething, this time with molars, and she’s caught every cold that’s come down the pike. Her appetite has not been great. At the moment, she eats most kinds of fresh fruit*, cheese, some yogurt, applesauce, peanut butter, crackers of all types, some pasta, and that’s really it. Oh, and air, in the form of any kind of puffed veggie-type food item like Pirate’s Booty or Snapea Crisps. She won’t eat baby food, she won’t eat potatoes (except the occasional French fry, her one food vice), she won’t eat rice or bread, and she won’t eat any kind of meat. She also won’t eat tofu. She eats green beans and sometimes broccoli.

It’s tough. Sometime she will eat things they offer her at daycare and then she won’t eat the exact same thing at home. Months ago she tried peas from a classmate's plate, and ate a bunch of them. She would eat them at home, but then one day she refused and hasn't eaten a pea since.

She is often crabby, and I am quite sure she is just hungry. But if you offer her a food she doesn’t recognize she will turn her head away and screech until you remove it from her sight, or at least from her highchair.

Someday I will look back on this and shake my head at how overly concerned I was, as I watch Celie eat a bowl of ceviche or something. But for now, I’m in the thick of it, and feeling pretty bad.

P.S. My doctor even suggested feeding her ice cream to fatten her up. Not sure that’s the road I want to take – first of all because of the sugar, and second of all because I don’t want her to grow up thinking of ice cream as a food group. Talk to me in a couple of weeks if she still hasn't gained weight.

* Except bananas. What kid doesn’t eat bananas?

Avoidance

2010-03-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

In direct contrast to the last couple of posts, today’s post is a bit fluffier. Think cotton candy. Sprinkled with just a light dusting of exasperation. Read on…

Well hey, it's that time of year again. What’s that, you say? Well, it’s Viva’s birthday! (Almost.) She will be seven in just nine more days – that’s right, she’s an April Fools baby. So I sent out birthday party invitations by email to some friends, and one emailed me back that she won’t be able to make it but by the way, she ran into the mom of one of Viva’s bestest besty friends in the whole world at the farmer’s market last weekend and the mom asked my friend to give me her phone numbers and call her because bestest besty friend misses her so much.

If they are bestest besty friends, you ask, why are we not in touch?

I’m so glad you asked. Viva and her friend (let’s call her BeBe) used to attend preschool together and were inseparable, and then her mom elected to take her out of private school and put her in a charter school. I’m not mad at that – if I could get Viva into a charter or magnet school, I would probably do the same.*

What I am mad at, and long-time readers (all two of you! Hi there!) may remember this, is that two years ago, we had decided to let Viva pick one friend to take to Disneyland for her birthday, and naturally Besty Best was that friend. I ran it by BeBe’s mom first, and told her no pressure, she didn’t have to decide right away. But I made it clear that we would pay for both of them to go with us for the whole day, and that food/treats/etc. were all part of the deal. Basically all they had to do was show up. And then I called her. And I called her. And she never took my calls. And I never heard back.

And you know, try explaining that to your 5-year-old. She was very upset, and I was all mama bear furious. (How dare you snub my kid? At least have the decency to call and say you can’t go, for whatever reason - make something up if you have to, for heaven's sake.) We ended up taking my sister and nephews and had a lovely time, despite my morning sickness and fatigue.

At any rate, I know what I should do. I should do the right thing, do what would make my kid happy, right? I should suck it up and call her. I know that. I just don’t want to!

* Just found out Viva got waitlisted for second grade at a charter school for the second year in a row. She is number 83 on the list. I love public school,** oh yes, I do.

** I’m not being sarcastic, I really do love public school. I just wish the ones in L.A. weren’t so hit and miss. And that the school-year schedule made sense for parents who work full-time and have no family support. I can’t really have my kid out of school for three weeks at a time at Christmas.

Sorrowful; Grieved; Sad

2010-03-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

On Monday, a hospice liaison came to visit my Nanna. In light of the spread of her cancer, they discussed the options: radiation, chemotherapy, or palliative care. My grandmother chose palliative care, so a nurse came on Tuesday and brought a wheelchair, oxygen, a bench for the shower, and morphine; and came back on Wednesday to review her medication schedule with my mom. A hospice nurse will visit on a regular schedule from now on.

So those are the facts. My head is all awhirl and I feel kind of sick and sad. I'm trying to think positively. I don't want her to suffer. I feel horrible that my mom, an only child, is experiencing this long, torturous process all over again - my grandfather died of metastasized prostate cancer nearly 6 years ago, at home, with hospice care. It was awful, horribly awful.

Trying to think of something positive to say, but right now - I got nothing.

Tongue Tied.

2010-03-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

I keep starting posts and deleting them today. When I re-read them, I feel they are hardly worth the effort of reading. So I delete. And then I rebuke myself sharply. And then I go sit in the corner and weep hot tears of futility. And then I think to myself, man, that salad I had for lunch is just not cutting it. I wish I had some chips or something. And then I realize that part of the problem is that I am so easily distracted these days. And then I go back to daydreaming about chips, and vacation, and the upcoming Macy’s sale.

Now that I am out of the habit of blogging it seems I can barely string two words together. Oh, noes!

I’ll try again tomorrow.

Mmm, chips.

Simple

2010-03-08T15:01:00.000-08:00

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
-Confucius

I have a family member who insists on making huge grand life decisions with (seemingly) nary a thought to the consequences. I don’t understand why, when faced with two possible routes on the road of life, this person invariably seems to choose the one which is clearly marked, for all to see, “Train Wreck.”

It is very frustrating to get a phone call with details of the wreck after such a decision has been made. I am never sure what to say. I try not to be judgmental (I know! Laughable!). It is difficult.

Keep things simple, I want to say. Address one problem at a time. Don’t create additional drama when you already have enough going on.

And if you can, eat a piece of red velvet cake. It may help put things in perspective.

Something's Gotta Give

2010-03-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

“Something’s gotta give,” we (as in Sweet Dub and I) keep telling each other. And yet it doesn’t.

We are stretched kind of thin these days. Work, for both of us, has been extremely demanding. We’ve been working on the weekends at times, trading off childcare with each other. For Sweet Dub, it looks like there will be no relief until June 18th, when the final project of the four he has slated must be done. Note that well, my friends. June 18th. Not to mention that whenever I can, I am driving up to visit my grandmother, who--it should be noted--has three kinds of cancer and is apparently too frail to have any treatment beyond pain medication.

We are a little fried, if you want to know. This morning, I went online to check Viva’s school schedule, and then I called Sweet Dub to tell him we need to make sure and schedule a vacation in late June.* And then I went online and did a little summer camp research. Have you noticed that it’s March?

Don’t wish your life away, I tell myself. These moments are important. Your kids are still so small. There must be time to sit down on the floor of the closet at the end of the day and take a little warm person into your lap and read “Please, Baby, Please” for the hundredth time. Or to sneak into bed with the Big Girl—the one with the legs that are ten feet long—and wake her up with raspberries and tickles. Is there anything quite like the giggle of a little kid?

I think not. And then there is Ella. I just can’t be too down when I listen to her.

When an irresistible force such as you
Meets an old immovable object like me
You can bet just as sure as you live
Something's gotta give, something's gotta give,
Something's gotta give.

Indeed.

* And not to be morbid or anything, but with my grandmother this sick, scheduling a getaway is probably not all that practical. What if something happened while we were away?

Still Snarky, Still Sleepy

2010-02-04T14:59:00.000-08:00

Wow, so here I am, off to a raging start with this blogging thing in 2010. It’s February already and I’ve posted only 3 times this year. Three cheers for mediocrity!

I meant to post, really. But I am being eaten alive by work, have been semi-obsessively watching the catastrophe in Haiti, and had horrible medical news about two people I am very close to (okay, one who I am very close to, and one who I work with – we are friends, but not like we vacation together or anything. But still I wouldn’t wish what he’s going through upon anyone.)* Oh, and Sweet Dub has taken on a new project outside of work which necessitates a commitment of more free time than he has, and I have these two small kids (have I mentioned them to you, ever?) living in my house who seem to need me for things like food and laundry and cuddling. When I have a moment to myself I like to maybe read a book or go for a walk or even watch TV. So there’s that then.

Last night, Viva had a total meltdown when she was told she needed to stop playing Wii (which she never does on weekdays, so it was a special privilege to begin with) and go take a bath. She said some things! She stomped her feet! Sweet Dub said some more things in a loud and angry tone! She was sent to her room! Much loud crying and screaming commenced from behind the closed door!

And then Sweet Dub came to me, where I was feeding our pajama’d Cily her bedtime bottle and said: “You know, we didn’t think about this before we got married. Your mother and my mother? Oh my God, we have fused them together to get the perfect drama queen!”

Yikes. We are smart in so many other ways.

P.S. Do you remember this post? About the Overnight diapers? And maybe that’s why Cily wasn’t sleeping through the night? Yeah?

No. No, that wasn’t it. It was just a fluke. She still wakes up Every. Flippin’. Night. at sometime between 3 and 4 AM. You can call that morning if you want to be technical, but to me, it falls very squarely into the time when I want to sleep, hence NIGHT. Gahhhh. When 6 AM rolls around, I am too through!

* My grandma’s tests came back even worse than before. Her lung cancer is not operable; it has spread too far, which is a very bad sign, because even a couple of months ago doctors thought that if they could just get her healthy, they could perform surgery where they would resection her lung. Since it has spread that quickly in just a couple of months, I am very scared that this means her time here on earth is much shorter than we anticipated. Never mind the cancer in her stomach and whatever the hell is going on with her liver (inconclusive).

As for my work friend: his newborn baby has a one-in-a-million type of disorder for which the only solution is brain surgery. My heart breaks for him. I can’t even imagine. This is going to be a long and difficult journey and I can’t even crack any jokes about it, which is my default way of dealing with things when things are not going well. So you see the situation I'm in.

It’s the Economy…

2010-01-12T11:17:00.000-08:00

Okay. So in reading here and there about my work life you may have surmised that I work in the nonprofit sector, and I do my best to raise money for the organization that employs me. In the down economy, this has been none too easy. The head of our department is preparing to be out of the office for a couple of weeks, and this morning he fixed me with a Look and said, “I was going over the numbers last night, and we’re in trouble.”

“I know,” I said. “We are in the hole.”

“No, we are really in trouble,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “We have been doing well raising money in certain areas, but for our annual fund [which provides general operating support], we are way down.”

“We need to get some more requests out,” he said. “And can you give me a list of everything that’s pending?”

I feel like we have been knocking ourselves out to prepare well-thought-out requests for support to funders who have an interest in what we do. Yet we keep getting declined.

Am I concerned about my job? Well, yes, I guess so. Common sense tells you that they’re not going to keep paying someone to TRY and raise money. They want to pay you to actually raise money. The past year or so has been disheartening to say the least.

So that’s where I am today. And I’m working on about four hours’ sleep. Dub and I stayed up talking until 11:30, Cily woke up at 11:50, and I didn’t get to sleep until close to 2 AM. And then, at 4:50 Dub came out and found me on the couch snuggled up with Cily and woke me up, insisting that I should come to bed. Can you imagine? How can I be married to this person?

My fury at being awakened was such that I could not get back to sleep for nearly 30 minutes. Dub woke me again at 6:25 to say he was leaving and I should get up or I’d be late. I wanted to hit him in the head with something but it was just too much trouble to move.

I miss my imaginary fantasy life, in which I’d get a full eight hours of sleep and wake up looking fabulous, to a clean house and children who would eat anything I put in front of them before we hopped into the mom-mobile and drove merrily off down the road, singing in perfect unison.

Did I mention how much I miss sleep? And how I’d like to keep my job? I guess those are the themes of the day.

An Unintentional Feminist Critique of Marriage

2010-01-11T12:27:00.000-08:00

This morning:

Viva: Why can’t chickens fly?

Mama: Their wings are too small for their bodies.* So even though they’re birds, they can’t fly.

Viva: Oh, like bees! Bees really shouldn’t be able to fly but they do, even though their bodies are so big and their wings are so small.

Mama: Yeah, that’s right. They say that it should be impossible for bees to fly.

Viva: I’m glad I’m not a bee. They only live for three days, you know.

Mama: Yes, I do remember hearing that somewhere.

Viva: Yeah, one time? I was at M’s house and this bee did not like him, and every time he would go outside this bee would go after him. And after three days, like on the third day? The bee started slowing down because it was dying you know? And you know what M did? He buried it!

Mama: Really? I don’t think I’ve heard this story before.

Viva: Yeah, he took a cough drop box and he put the bee in it and then he dug a hole and he put the bee in the box in the hole and then he had a funeral for it? He sang like this: “Duh duhn da da…”

Takes a minute to realize that Viva (and/or her cousin) apparently believes that the “Here Comes the Bride” song is funeral music. Hilarious.

* Because they’ve been selectively bred to be extra-big in the breast for human eating purposes. Kind of gross when you think about it.

Feliz Ano, Internets!

2010-01-06T15:17:00.001-08:00

So I'm posting. Anything to get the basset hounds off the screen!

Well, hello. Let me share with you the marvelousness of 2010 that has thus far overtaken me. For quite some time now, I have been sleep-deprived. I attributed my baby not sleeping through the night as not eating enough solids during the day. She wakes up because she's hungry, I thought. So she would wake up at around 3:45 or 4:00 AM every day, and I would change her diaper and feed her a bottle and put her back to bed, and I would eventually fall back to sleep and then when 6:00 AM rolled around I could not get out of bed to get to work on time. This went on, this ridiculous pattern, for eons of time.

Yesterday, I broke down and bought some Overnights diapers in despair. Lo and behold, the baby slept from 8:30 PM to 5:30 AM. Hey, guess what - she was waking up because she was wet, and cold from the wet! Poor thing.

Now that I have had one night of uninterrupted sleep, there's no telling what I might get up to. I have all kinds of ambitious plans. I might blog more regularly, even (though I won't recap my holiday season for you, because I just won't do that to you. There was family drama and that's all I wish to say.).

Consider yourself forewarned, is all. And to all a good night!

What on Earth Would Jesus Think?!

2009-12-16T14:43:00.001-08:00

Basset Hound Nativity Set

Wow. I mean, WOW. I don’t even know what to say.

Um.

Oh.

Image brought to you courtesy of my new favorite site, Regretsy. Go now, trust me. And scroll through their archives. It's comic gold.

Oh, wait. Before you go: I thought I was struck speechless before, but now I may never talk again:

Poor Baby Jesus Meerkat. He looketh sore afraid.

Yeah. Wow. I’m…I just…wow.

Birds, Bees & Ogres

2009-12-14T16:44:00.000-08:00

The Scene: it is Sunday night. I am doing Viva’s hair, a long process of sectioning and oiling and combing through each section and twisting each section down into one long plait, secured with a barrette. Because this is a long process, we generally watch a movie while it’s going on. It doesn’t take me the whole movie to finish her hair, but it’s a nice ritual involving microwave popcorn and lemonade.

The Movie: we are watching Shrek the Third. There is a point at which (spoilers ahead! For a movie that’s at least a couple of years old!) Shrek (the ogre, in case you’ve been living under a rock) is leaving on a quest in a large ship going out of the harbor. His wife Fiona is on shore and she calls out, “I’m pregnant!” Shrek is completely freaked out, and as the boat pulls away, the following conversation takes place:

Shrek: I can't believe I'm going to be a father. How did this happen?

Puss In Boots: Allow me to explain. When a man falls in love with a woman, he is overcome with powerful urges—

Shrek [yelling]: I know how it happened! I just can't believe it. [stomps off]

Donkey [to Puss]: How *does* it happen?

Viva [to me]: How *does* it happen?

Mama: Oh, well – you know, we’ve talked about this a little before. You know the daddy kind of plants a seed in the mommy and it grows into a baby.

Viva: But HOW does he do it?

Mama [biting the bullet]: Well, the daddy puts his [clinical term] into the mommy’s [clinical term] and—

Viva: Oh my GOD.

Mama: Yeah, that’s pretty much everyone’s reaction when they first find out. It sounds unbelievable, but that’s how it happens.

Viva: That is WEIRD.

Mama: Well, when two people love each other, it’s kind of like – it’s a very special kind of hugging that they do.

Viva: You mean a very WEIRD kind of hugging.

Mama: Okay then.

And by then we were on to the scene where Shrek is having nightmares about ogre babies projectile vomiting and crying and having multiple near-accidents, and that was the end of that.

I’ve shared this story with a few people since then, and the reaction seems to be: “Wow, I can’t believe you straight out told her like that.”

I’m really not sure what else I was expected to do. She asked me a question and I answered honestly in a spur-of-the-moment way that I hope was age-appropriate. I want her to feel she can ask me anything, and I don’t want her to feel like the Big Topics are off-limits. And it seems to me that 6 is a pretty reasonable age for her to be curious about where babies come from, and that now I can go ahead and get a book like this, or this, or this, for us to read together and talk if she wants to. (I think when I was little I read this. I wonder if it’s held up over the years or if it’s dated.)

At any rate, I would love to hear from you about your experiences talking with your own kids, or your own “birds and the bees” talk with your parent(s), if you ever had The Talk. My mom was always very frank with me and my sister, and I’d like to be the same way with my kids. Curious to hear other people's experiences! PG only please!

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

2009-11-30T23:37:00.000-08:00

You should write a book, they say.

Oh my God, that’s hilarious. When are you going to write about it?

If you don’t write all this stuff down, you’ll lose it.

At the same time: work, sickness, two small kids. November started with the flu and ended with some gastrointestinal horrors, sandwiched around but not related to or caused by Thanksgiving. A small girl who is lonely and whose tummy hurts and who wants her mama. An even smaller girl who wants to be in the middle of where everyone is, who repeats over and over in the sweetest voice imaginable, “Uh-oh!” about everything.

And the holidays! They are upon us. Good grief.

Where will I find the time?

I lost a week of work this month to illness. I am so terribly behind. I worked at home during the Thanksgiving weekend. I worked this evening after putting the kids to bed. Speaking of which, the baby (soon-to-be-toddler) is waking up three times a night. It is like she has regressed back to the early days. And, exhausted, my sweet husband has passed out next to the baby. He is snoring softly. And just in thinking of him I think, his birthday is coming up. Yet another twinge of guilt and despair! How will I get it all done?

I need time for myself – time to exercise, time to write things that aren’t for work, time to get my hair cut. I am feeling a bit raggedy. I breathe. I am thankful, don’t get it twisted. My little family is such a swirling tide of love. I just feel like I am constantly pulling together a shawl that is unraveling and getting smaller all the time. It just won’t cover me.

And in taking the time to write it down, at least I can look back and remember what on earth was going on. And find the humor in it. Ha. Ha. Yes, and ha.

Thankfully, Los Angeles does not disappoint. Last week, I was driving south on Crenshaw Blvd. and just as I reached the red light at Jefferson, I saw a bright orange ice-cream-type truck turn left onto Crenshaw. That truck, my friends, was the Grilled Cheese Truck. Now, THAT is fabulousness made real. The Grilled Cheese Truck just made its debut in October of this year, so I feel I am almost somewhat on the cutting edge in reporting this to you. They tweet and publish a schedule of when the truck will be in various locations so you can go get a fresh grilled cheese sandwich when the mood strikes. Among other things, they do a Gruyere melt, which sounds divine.

Yup, Grilled Cheese Truck. You heard it here first (maybe). Now I must arise from the laptop and collapse into bed, at which point no doubt the Babe will awake and I will suppress the urge to scream. One love, all. One love.

On the Mend

2009-11-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

The Blah Blahs are recovering from whatever horrible ailment that was. And thus and so we have all returned to “normal” life, off to work and school and day care. Cily did not seem so sure about day care this morning. She had a rough night and her cheeks are kind of swollen, indicating to me that teeth are about to break through. Cily would not eat breakfast, and neither would Viva, and I fretted a bit about it in the car as we tootled off to begin our days, but then Viva could not stop telling me the entire plot of the Captain Underpants book she read last night, and Cily chimed in loudly here and there cheerfully, at times talking over her sister (she is not quite clear on conversational concepts yet, but would feel right at home with some of my closest friends who, and they know who they are, can’t quite ever let one get a full sentence out without bursting out with an exclamation) and so I managed to get over it, letting Viva out of the car at school with a Tupperware of dry cereal to munch on and handing a bottle to Cily’s day care provider as I handed her over. And then somehow I drank two cups of coffee at work and got to lunchtime and realized I hadn’t eaten breakfast either.

Soup is the answer. I think it cures all kinds of ills.

But Not the Flu

2009-11-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

Today I am sick.

Darling Sweet Dub is sick.

Precious Cily is sick.

Viva: healthy as all get-out and raring to go. What adventure awaits her today?

I am at work, having come in just to make edits and print and mail out a project so I can cross it off my “to do” list. It is quiet here today – about half the staff in our department are out at a conference. I am enjoying the calm.

Soon I will make phone calls, and I will sketch out my next assignment, and I will leave here and pick up Cily from the lovely and loving women who care for her all day. Cily, sweet Cily gives kisses to all of us without pursing her lips. Sometimes they are open-mouthed kisses, and she chews a little bit on your face, kind of thoughtful-like, before moving on to smear her spit on your cheek. I am guessing this is how both Sweet Dub and I got sick, since who can resist her?

I will try and work from home for the rest of the day. Cily, I know, may not cooperate. But I will first make my phone calls and see what avenue to take next, and then maybe once we get home she will nap. And I may sneak some pictures of her because she is so scrumptious.

And that other girl, Viva, will come home victorious from whatever she has done today and declare that I am the best mom ever because when I make myself a cup of tea I automatically make her a cup of hot cocoa. And I will try not to give her my germs, but it will be hard, because who can resist her?

And maybe for Sweet Dub, I will make some chicken soup to share. He too is at work. (What a crazy life – we all have “too much to do.”) So he will come home and all of us will collapse in bed together and he will be so sweet with the children as we all loll about that I might have to kiss him and share his germs too, because how can I resist him?

So that is the plan for the day. Be well, my friends.

Terribly Out of Fashion

2009-11-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

Transcript of recent conversation with my 6-year-old.

Viva: Why are you wearing (pause for effect) THOSE earrings?

Mama: These? (feels ears because can’t remember which ones) Oh, these. Um, I don’t know, I never wear them and Daddy gave them to me and so I thought today I would wear them. Why? Don’t you like them?

Viva: Well, Mah-OM (like she doesn’t know exactly how to tell me this): they look like boys’ earrings.

Mama: (busts out laughing) OH! MY. GOD! HONEY!

Sweet Dub (from another part of the house): WHUH?

Mama: Come and hear what your child is saying.

Viva: What? They DO.

Sweet Dub: What?

Mama: Listen to what has become of this generation. Your child thinks these look like boys’ earrings.

Sweet Dub (bursts out laughing) Oh, no. Really? Is that what we’ve come to?

Mama: Bling bling.

Note: The earrings in question are diamond studs. I have a tendency to wear dangly earrings mostly, so I hardly ever wear them. It appears that all the young men who like the hippity-hop music wear earrings like this and thus have ruined them forever for everyone else. Evidently I can’t yet wear them as a subversive, arch act of turning fashion on its head because people will just think I’m out of touch rather than cutting edge. Woe is me.

365

2009-10-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

One year ago today, I posted this:

I've been having contractions since 5:30 or so this morning. They have been intensifying but are still not at the magic "every 5 minutes, 1 minute in duration" level. Nonetheless, we've kept Viva home from school while we wait to see what happens and we've got all local family members on standby. I am cramping, hips are extra sore, back is killing me. It feels like this is it.

Happy 1st Birthday, Celia, my love. You are tremendous and I love you even more today than 365 short days ago when we first met. I am sorry that you woke up on today of all days cold and wet and with poop in your pants. Hopefully, each birthday will be better than the last!

Cily, about 10 minutes after waking up cold and wet (her diaper leaked) and with poop in her pants. Approximately 5 AM today.

Help Me Win a Trip to Disneyland!

2009-10-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, you know I am not one to toot my own horn, BUT: would you please vote for me? Los Angelista is running a VIP Disneyland giveaway on her site and I’m a semi-finalist! If I win, I get to join Los Angelista’s family on November 21st with 3 guests (guess who? If you guessed Sweet Dub, Viva and Cily, right on) for the VIP treatment at Disneyland. How fun is that? And all made possible by the modern miracle that is the Internet. I’ve emailed back and forth for maybe years now with Liz (Los Angelista), but somehow we have never met in person. This could be our chance! (Well, we’ll probably meet anyway at some point, but how great to meet at the Happiest Place on Earth?)

You can vote for me by clicking here and leaving a comment! Thank you!

Joy Inside My Tears

2009-10-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve been a bit down lately. Work has been stressful; dealing with my Nanna’s illness has been stressful, etc. So I’ve been trying to Turn My Frown Upside Down! by doing things that make me happy, like listening to fun music. Long story short: this morning, we were listening to Stevie Wonder in the car (Songs in the Key of Life), more specifically “Black Man.” If you haven’t heard the song, well, how to describe it? It is more than 8 minutes long, for one thing, and it was written in the mid-70s, at a time in Stevie’s life where he had become hugely commercially successful and also extremely politically conscious.

This is not the strongest song on the album, but I appreciate what Stevie is trying to do here – he is basically giving a shout-out to all the different races that make up America, and describing how individuals of different colors all made significant contributions to our culture. Sample lyrics:

Heart surgery
Was first done successfully
By a black man (Dr Daniel Hale Williams)

Friendly man who died
But helped the pilgrims to survive
Was a red man (Squanto)

Farm workers rights
Were lifted to new heights
By a brown man (Cesar Chavez)

Incandescent light
Was invented to give sight
By the white man (Thomas Edison)

We pledge allegiance
All our lives
To the magic colors
Red, blue and white
But we all must be given
The liberty that we defend
For with justice not for all men
History will repeat again
It's time we learned
This World Was Made For All Men

Okay, so putting aside for the moment the gender exclusion of the lyrics (and the un-PCness of references to the red and yellow man – yikes), I was trying to explain the core of the song to Viva. I told her why at the time it was written the song was important, and how Stevie was trying to counteract the beliefs of some people in the world who think bad things about whole groups of people simply based on the color of their skin or what country they come from. “That’s called racism,” I said. “Have you ever heard of that word?”

“No,” Viva said. For a second I hesitated. Should I even open up this can of worms? But I want her to know she can talk to me about anything, even the hard stuff, so I continued. The conversation segued into a discussion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his work and struggle.

“I bet Martin Luther King would be happy that Barack Obama is president,” Viva said. Oh, my girl – I just love her so.

I said, “Yes, I think he would be very excited, you’re right. This was one of the things he worked for, so that people who look like Barack Obama can have important jobs like being president. That is why it was such a huge deal – you remember how Daddy and I cried when he got elected? It’s because we were so happy to see this day come.”

And I swear to you, I got a lump in my throat and started crying a little as I was saying it. Sometimes I really miss my grandpa, and for whatever reason the election makes me think of him – I’m sad that he didn’t live to see a black man become president. And now, my grandma is ill, and that makes me sadder.

So, yeah, score 1 for substantive morning car conversation, but score 0 for helping my mood lift!

At any rate, I had pushed aside the morning’s conversation and then I happened to read a post at Anti-Racist Parent today, and yes. Tami pretty much said what I was feeling, way better than I could have said it. The Website name will be changing to “Love Isn’t Enough” next week, and here’s why.

Now, that lifted my mood.

Greenhouse Gas-X

2009-10-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

Hey, it’s Blog Action Day! This year’s theme is climate change, and it’s very timely. Back in the day, we used to refer to people who were passionate about the environment as “crunchy granola”* types. It seems that here in my little corner of Los Angeles, we have more than our share of granola crunchers, juxtaposed with those who drive their Hummers from their house to the grocery store three blocks away. I see plenty of Priuses in my neck of the woods, and even old diesel cars that have been converted to run on vegetable oil.

Something new to me that I’ve been seeing as I drive about Los Angeles in the day-to-day are more and more cars with a “TerraPass” bumper sticker. After I’d seen it more than a few times, I set aside my lazy and forgetful ways for just a moment and – what else? – Googled it.

Huzza! At the TerraPass website, you can purchase carbon offsets (among other things) in varying amounts. TerraPass is evidently the #1 online carbon offset retailer. I can hear you all muttering out there, “Okay, fine, but what exactly is a carbon offset and why should I care?”

Dude! You should totally care because of the environment (love your mother!). Eat some granola and go to TerraPass or one of the many sites online where you can calculate your carbon footprint. This, my friends, is your personal contribution to global warming (see, climate change) via many daily activities you don’t even think about: driving, flying, or even heating your home. Through these activities, people produce carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas (read: no good for the environment). When you purchase carbon offsets, you’re funding projects which offset the environmental destruction your heinous, heinous ways have caused. Brighter Planet does a lovely job (certainly better than I can do) of explaining what carbon offsets are and the kinds of projects they consist of.

Back to the TerraPass bumper stickers: cars and trucks are responsible for 25% of all U.S. carbon emissions. Yeah, that’s pretty bad. By purchasing carbon offsets, you can balance out your daily damage to the ozone and alleviate some of your guilt. (Note I said some of your guilt. Carbon offsets will not remedy any of the following: your unwillingness to call your mother lately, the three consecutive bags of potato chips you ate yesterday, or you tearing up and throwing out your last jury duty summons. The offset thing is not a magical cure-all. Sorry.)

And that is one way you can do your part to counteract climate change. And if you want to eat granola while doing so, I promise not to tell.

P.S. You know what else they sell at TerraPass? Climate Change Chocolate. What’s not to love?

* Hey, I LOVE granola. Not casting aspersions. It’s all good.

A Few Reasons Why I've Been Scarce

2009-10-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

1. Errands! There are many things I can’t get done on the weekends because I am just trying to clean the house/enjoy my family/have a life. Thus, errands get done during my lunch hour, which is often when I would usually take the time to compose blog posts, as a break from my work day. (Yeah, I said it.)

[1a. Aside: I have not found a dry cleaner near our new house. The one I am using now is not in the flow of my life at all. Either I need to switch out my entire work wardrobe to some kind of perma-press fabric, or I need to locate a fabbo new dry cleaner. Hmm, which will it be?]

2. Speaking of work: WORK! There is very much much of it, as in a muchness of it, as in a too muchness of it. As much as it pleases me to have a regular paycheck and healthcare benefits, and as much as I am grateful for having a job at all in this economy, it does sometimes feel overwhelming. As in, too much.*

3. Nanna! Not well, and not really understanding what’s wrong with her, and thus not really understanding what medical options she has and what they all mean. I am trying to be diplomatic with my mom, who is her primary caregiver and appears to be in a spiral of depression and denial and not wanting to ask the doctors too many questions for fear of seeming pushy. (Yes, take a moment to re-read that. Doesn’t want to be pushy. Dear God, I hope when I am 84 years old and not able to advocate for myself that other people will be pushy on my behalf.) So I am now delicately trying to be pushy with her, in the nicest way possible, couching it in terms of how I know this has been hard for her and we all love Nanna so much and just want the best possible care for her. And of course we just want to help my mom as much as we can but we can only do that if we have all the information we’d need to help make decisions about her care. Specifically, I am concerned about a surgery that the oncologist is proposing, but the cardiologist is cautioning against because he doesn’t think Nanna’s heart could take the strain. At this point, we know she has cancer in her lungs and stomach but they have not yet determined if she has it in her liver, although they suspect from her last CAT scan that she does. I would like to have the whole picture before they cut her open, and indeed even before they recommend a course of treatment for the two cancers she has. On the other hand, I am not there on the day-to-day, so it’s easier for me to put the brakes on. Much of the time, Nanna is in pain, and that is very, very hard to witness. One more thing: the lung cancer surgery involves partial removal of one of her lungs, which my mother has not shared with her “because she gets so agitated.” Of course, I understand not wanting to add to her stress, but at the same time, I strongly feel that if she is going to have surgery she deserves to know what exactly is going to be done to her. It’s her body, after all. And it makes me wonder: what kind of doctor would recommend a surgery to someone without fully explaining what it involves, and in the case of an elderly woman who is not always lucid, without ensuring that she understands what is involved? I could go on, but see #s 1 and 2, and #4.

4. Children! One is turning one in ten days! Both need Halloween costumes! One needs new shoes (size 1.5)! One needs long-sleeved T-shirts (size 12-18 months)! Both need various and different foods at different times from different places! One never wants to be separated from me, ever – but dammit, will I put her down and let her explore the house and throw everything around the room and put stuff in her mouth but don’t go too far how could I leave her AAAAAAAAAAAAA! One is pleased that we had an impromptu water balloon fight Friday evening but enraged that I asked her to bring her sweat jacket in from the car! Children are fun but exhausting! They make me write everything in exclamation points because that’s how we roll!

5. Sickness! Sweet Dub had stomach flu last week; I have a persistent sore throat and now an earache. Cily’s nose is breaking all previously known records for runniness. Viva: healthy as a horse. Knock wood.

Aaaand, I'm out.

* I just had to see how many times I could use the word “much” in that last paragraph.

Cross-Cultural Fun Times

2009-10-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

How much rudeness can you explain away as the result of someone who is not a native English speaker not being able to communicate in a tactful or nuanced fashion?

When I was pregnant with Cily, I had an encounter with someone at work who is on pretty much everyone’s Must Avoid List. I ran into her in the bathroom and she said, gesturing at my swelling belly, “Lisa, are you pregnant?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m six months along.”

“Boy or girl?” she said.

“It’s a little girl,” I said.

“ANOTHER GIRL? Well, better luck next time,” she said, and went into the stall.

Oh. Right.

So anyway, yesterday I ran into her, again in the bathroom. I mainly try to avoid her (see above re: Must Avoid List), but you know, there is that whole inconvenient “must void bladder” issue as well. So there I was, and she said: “Lisa, who watches your kid now?”

“She is in day care, just down the street,” I said. She gasped. No, really, she did, and then she said in a horrified tone:

“ALL DAY?!”

“Yes, all day. I work full-time,” I said. And then I did something I hardly ever do, because despite what you might think I’m generally pretty polite. I gave her The Look. The “what the hell are you trying to pull here, lady?” Look. The “I can’t believe you’re asking me that” Look. The “if I were male you wouldn’t be asking me that” Look. And she shut up and put her head down and scuttled out of the bathroom.

She really chaps me. Is that not rude?

Monday, Melancholy

2009-10-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

It’s October. Work and home life insanely busy. I barely remember September. Recent news:

Cily: top two front teeth have come through. Stomach flu this weekend. Will not stop crawling and cruising and moving and wiggling and where did the baby go?

Viva: late trip to the lake last month. Took up waterskiing. How is it that I, the klutziest, most uncoordinated and most accident-prone person alive, gave birth to this?

(Look, it's the teeniest water-skiier in the world. Why do you do this, Blogger? I'll have to try this again later.)

Sweet Dub: my love. Yesterday was our 8th wedding anniversary. Between the diarrhea-laden baby and both of us coming down with the latest ailment, we spent the day bumping into each other occasionally and saying, “Happy Anniversary,” rather mournfully.

Nanna: Cancer in her lungs and stomach. Awaiting biopsy of her liver. Doctors want to do surgery, say she will live another two years if they do it. “I’m 84,” she says. “Two more years isn’t bad at 84.” The twist: the last time I saw her, she asked me how old Viva was: “Two or three?” (Viva is 6 years old.) Moral of the story: I’m questioning whether my grandmother can genuinely make this decision about surgery for herself. She is sometimes lucid, sometimes not so much.

I’m having weird dreams about Nanna and my grandfather (deceased) going on a trip and moving to a new house, leaving behind a house filled with all kinds of baggage. Sometimes your subconscious isn’t all that subtle, is it?

Meanwhile, I am sick and my throat is on fire. I crave a big steaming bowl of homemade minestrone soup. Maybe I’ll make some…here in my office, where it is about 35 degrees. Happy Monday.

Why We Are Perfect (For Each Other)

2009-09-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

Backstory: last week Sweet Dub and I caught part of the latest George Lopez comedy special on…HBO, or one of those premium channels we pay too much for. During his routine, he called out this guy in the front row and put the camera on him. Dude had a tattoo of George Lopez’s FACE on his upper arm. Serious stan.

Later that week, for no reason at all:

Mama Blah: I am going to get a tattoo of Kanye West’s face.
Sweet Dub [as if this is perfectly reasonable]: Where?
Mama Blah: Across my forehead. Would you be okay with that?
Sweet Dub [not missing a beat]: Only if you call him K-Weezy.

You see why I can never leave him, right?

The Next Chapter?

2009-09-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but one thing that seems to be a constant in the Blah Blah world is Change. We seem frequently to be adjusting to some major life upheaval, and sometimes more than one at the same time. This has been a pattern pretty much since I met Sweet Dub, lo some nine years ago. (We met, I started a new job, I hated the new job, I quit the new job, I moved in with him, he proposed, we got married. And that was just the first year! In year two I had a cancer scare, surgery and then got pregnant! )

Now, we’ve just moved for the second time in a year. And you’d think I’d just want things to simmer down and be status quo for a bit. But I have to tell you: change is in the air.

I’m not enjoying what I do right now. Hm. How to explain it. Do any of you remember a children’s book called Beyond the Pawpaw Trees*? The heroine of the book, Anna Lavinia, misses her father, who is a dreamer and is missing for part of the book because he is off chasing rainbows. (I know, it sounds horrible and treacly, but truly I loved it and even as a kid I had no patience for pap, so bear with me as I am not doing it justice.) At any rate, at one point Anna Lavinia is eating oatmeal and juxtaposing in her mind how most people would say “Eat because you are hungry,” while her father would say “Eat because it is fun!” and she looks at her bowl and decides she is finished eating because once her spoon (which stood up in the oatmeal) had fallen over, the oatmeal wasn’t fun anymore.

Well, that’s how I feel. It’s not fun. And the things I want to do are so different from what I am doing, and I’m feeling kind of ecch. And blah. And blech. And all kind of how do I get there from here, and where do I find the time, and by the way I have bills to pay and kids to raise, and what about that husband of mine, maybe I should pay attention to him just a little bit so he doesn’t run off into the night, and honestly what are you thinking anyway, work is work and no one said it would be fun, and yeah.

Furthermore, and just to put it all out on the table, I hate all my clothes and I’m considering cutting my hair (this is partly because I’ve been unable to find my hair accessories since we moved, except for one lousy ponytail holder that was wrapped around the gear shift in my car).

Yeah, a little bit of existential whining here. What is it all about, what does it mean, why is my stomach so flabby? How is it possible that Ben & Jerry’s could create something that I don’t like**? And what about…Naomi?***

* Holy crap, it’s out of print and the cheapest used copy I can find is $129.99! One seller is listing it at $399.00. WHAT?! (I regret to inform you that my copy was lost when my mom donated all my childhood books after I left for college. Sigh.)

** It made my stomach hurt.

*** The tagline of the classic soap opera parody "Love of Chair" from The Electric Company. I just found out that “Naomi” turns out to be the mother of actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhall. (According to Wikipedia – so it must be true!)

Tired. And tired of being tired!

2009-09-04T16:40:00.001-07:00

As we roll into the Labor Day weekend, I'm looking forward to spending time with my family, gradually unpacking a box here and there, and getting some rest. It will be a weekend tinged with sadness and worry – we just learned that my grandmother has a cancerous mass in her lung and will be having it removed on Tuesday. I'm driving up to see her tomorrow. There are other tests to be done; cat scans show suspicious shadows on her liver and thyroid as well.

So I will be sitting around with a big old "sadness wrapped in anxiety peppered with fear" burrito churning in my stomach this weekend, but I'm trying not to let it overshadow our first real weekend in the new house, and you can say all you want about me being in denial if you want and I won't be mad. I'm trying to focus on something happy, so sue me.

Now, the new house is not without its flaws. I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect house. But in our last house, I felt like we were almost imprisoned in the house. The street was really narrow, the neighborhood was really congested, and I felt like we heard other people's noise constantly. It felt like our neighbors were right on top of us all the time. The new house is in a quiet neighborhood. When I'm inside the house, even with two small and very loud children, nonetheless there is a stillness and a peace that is part of the house. It is a sweet relief. We also have an outside space that is usable, whereas in our old house they had paved and tiled over the backyard to be used for entertaining. New house: grass, and lots of it.

The Blah Blahs love to be outside. Not having a usable outdoor space in Southern California, where it is lovely to be outside 95% of the time, was a little crazy-making. I am looking forward to barbecuing, and challenging Viva to soccer games, and plopping my feet into kiddie pools, and slurping lemonade in a lawn chair. Simple pleasures, my friends.

I am looking forward to Labor Day, and to not working in an office on that day. I am grateful in this economy to have a job at all, and I realize I am blessed. I just need a day to rest and enjoy the simple things. A very safe and simple Labor Day to you and yours.

Completely Bone Tired. And Not in the Way I Like.

2009-09-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

We've moved. In the midst of 100-degree heat and horrendous air quality due to the wildfires here in Los Angeles. Dear God, my head hurts.

Posting will remain light as we get settled.

Room to Breathe

2009-08-24T15:35:00.001-07:00

What a momentous weekend!

Celia turned 10 months! I would post a recent picture but I've been distracted because:

Viva lost her top front tooth! She was excited, if a little unsure, because some spoilsport 5^th grader at school told her "The Tooth Fairy is actually your mom." I was happy to honestly be able to tell her I have never snuck into her room to take her tooth and leave money under her pillow. (I leave that to Daddy since I generally fall asleep while waiting for Viva to fall asleep on such occasions.) I would post a picture of her newly revised smile, but I haven't had a minute because:

We found a house! And we've been approved to rent it! Thank you, thank you, everyone, for sending all your good wishes and good vibes our way. There are many simply wonderful things about this house:

It is about the same square footage as our current house, but costs substantially less. I mean, way less. I mean, like cuts our housing costs by one-quarter.
It sits on a 14,000 square foot lot. No, that's not a typo. It's huge, especially by LA standards. The backyard goes on forever, and it's completely gated, and it's flat! Perfect for playing soccer, tag, whatever.
The house itself has three bedrooms and three baths, and comes with all appliances including a restaurant-grade six-burner stove. I admit to being a little intimidated by the stove, although the owner says, "On Thanksgiving, you can cook a turkey and a ham at the same time, and cook your pies – all on the same day!" That sounds a little ambitious, wouldn't you say?
The neighborhood seems to be a very nice diverse mix of ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds: you got your Hispanic, African-American, South Asian and Asian all very well-represented on the same street, and young families with kids live side-by-side with elderly types.
There's an elementary school down the block, which makes it a safe school zone (note that the accompanying link is not for our specific neighborhood school, but it’s still a good explanation). The park right next to the school is well-patrolled as well as being locked at night. There’s also a sheriff living right around the corner.
It's not a cut-through to anywhere – the street curves around in a "C," taking you around the block right back to the main street from which it comes. That, combined with the speed humps peppered along, means there's no speeding through the neighborhood.
It's less than a mile from Target! And Trader Joe's!
The shower stall in the master suite is 5' by 5' and has three shower heads. And a separate Jacuzzi tub. "There is a danger that we could get spoiled by this house," I said to Sweet Dub this weekend. It is a little crazy. I like that the house is very modest from the outside. (Ah, that New England Puritan streak rears its ugly head at the most unexpected times.)
It's a slightly longer commute, but still no freeway driving.
We can get a dog. Since Viva has been asking for a puppy almost every day since she was about three, this is very welcome news. Not something that will happen right away, but fun to think about.
Two of Dub's closest friends (who he's known since junior high) live less than five minutes away. One has two girls, ages 7 and 3, and the other has a 9-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter. Viva has known them all her life, so it is pretty much Insta-Playdate City.

We are officially moving next weekend, although the house is now vacant and we are cleared to move in at any time. We spent much of this weekend sorting, cleaning, and packing. I am relieved to have packed about half of my kitchen, which is usually one of the most time-consuming jobs. Any box which is labeled "kitchen - not everyday" can happily sit for a few weeks without being unpacked, and seeing as they don't get much use anyway, my giant roasting pan, blender, and slow-cooker will be none the wiser.

Posting may be lighter than usual (I know, how is that even possible?) over the next couple of weeks due to the moving mayhem.

And, exhale.

P.S. Apologies if you see multiple RSS-feed updates. Something is funky with the spacing so I had to keep going back to try and fix it after it already published.

P.P.S. I had to go back and tinker with the HTML again. Sorry. Something is just not sitting right with the Blogger temperament.

P.P.P.S. Ah. I just discovered that Blogger thinks I am typing this whole post as a table. Yeah, but I'm not, see?

Sick and Tired

2009-08-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

Like many Americans, I’m confused about the health care reform legislation currently taking form in Washington. I understand that one of the main goals with this reform is to provide insurance for people who don’t have it/can’t afford it. What I’m not seeing clearly spelled out (and admittedly, perhaps my work-life demands are getting in the way of me researching this properly) is: what about those of us who have insurance but the insurance is crappy? As in, the premiums increase every year, the deductible increases every year, the amount of coinsurance increases every year, and yet if anything you get less care?

Right now in the Blah Blah’s employer-provided coverage, we pay insurance premiums and then we also have a $500 deductible apiece, on top of which we each have to pay 20% of any medical costs beyond that, up to $3,500 per year per individual or $5,000 per family. What that means is that if we had serious medical problems we’d have to pay up to $2,000 in deductibles, plus $5,000 in coinsurance out of pocket. There is also a lifetime cap but I haven’t yet paid attention to that because our insurance carrier changes almost every year as costs go up and the company negotiates with various carriers to get the best deal.

Now, the insurance premiums are no joke either. At my job to pay for yourself and a family you can expect to pay some $1,800 for premiums per month. The company will pay your premiums, but not those of your family. Fortunately for me, Sweet Dub’s job offers a better deal on insurance and will actually pay for part of the premium, so I’m covered through his employer rather than my own. I realize we are privileged because we both have jobs that offer insurance, but it sure doesn’t feel like I’m getting what we’re paying for when even with insurance, I’ve paid over $7,000 out of pocket this year for having a baby in October and having her end up in the NICU.

Yes, at least we have insurance, but I fight with the insurance company at least once every couple months. The latest thing we’re dickering about is me having a mammogram. Isn’t it recommended that women age 40 and over have an annual mammogram? (Answer: why, yes – yes it is!) Particularly if they (like me) have a history of breast cancer in their family, or (like me) have had a suspicious lump biopsied in the past. And yet, I’m having to fight with my insurance company over whether I have coverage for this procedure, which was recommended by my primary care physician and my gynecologist. They want me to pay 300 bucks and some change for this screening.

I’ve been trying to get caught up on the health insurance reform storm, I swear I have. I have heard so many horror stories of people who are uninsured, and as we’ve seen with the recent Remote Area Medical Foundation visit in Inglewood, which wrapped up yesterday, there is a huge need for free and/or affordable medical care here in my own neck of the woods. But I want some reassurance that those of us who are “insured” are also going to get some help. Am I missing something?

Not funny, and yet it is.

2009-08-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

My grandmother is in poor health. She will be having a lung biopsy later this week because a recent scan showed what looks like lesions on her lungs. She is on some pain medication and sleeps much of the time, and when she is awake she is pretty out of it.

Recently my 6-year-old nephew, who lives in the same house as my grandmother and mom (yes, four generations under one roof – it’s like a sitcom but not at all funny), made a little bird out of beads. My sister Lola told him it was beautiful and asked if she could have it. He replied that he had made it specially for Nanna (my grandmother has always had a thing for birds). He was a little shy about giving it to her, but he mustered up his resolve and knocked on her bedroom door.

“Here, Nanna,” he said. “I made this for you.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” my grandmother said. “Did you know I’m going into the hospital?”

“Yeah,” T said. “You can take this with you—“

“They’re going to stick a knife in my neck!” my grandmother said.*

Well, that shouldn’t give him nightmares at all. Thanks for sharing, Nanna!

* My understanding is that they are going to go through her throat rather than open up her chest. This is the less invasive procedure, probably due to her age. I am concerned either way about post-procedure infection but I am trying not to think about it and I am not getting a whole lot of info from my mom, which is par for the course. Mainly because she doesn’t like to talk about it in front of my grandmother because it agitates her. This is why email was invented. Why don’t people understand?

On the move. Yeah, again.

2009-08-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

“Your life is like a bad comedy,” the real estate agent said as she was showing us a place on Saturday.

It’s not feeling very funny right now. Let’s recap: about a year ago, our then-landlord contacted us and apologetically stated that he and his wife were getting divorced, and that he knew it was horrible timing since we were expecting a new baby, but that he would like his house back. I was 7.5 months pregnant. We found another place and, one week after getting out of the hospital from my C-section, we moved to our current rental house.

Now, our current landlord has approached us with the wonderful news that he and his wife are expecting. How exciting! Oh, and guess what – they want their house back. They’re happy to let us out of our lease early if we can find something and get the heck out.

Both times, this hasn’t given us enough time to find a place to buy, even if we were in the position to do so. This has been a rough year financially. You remember that we thought we could pay more in rent because it would be offset by having Viva in public school and not having to pay private school tuition. Oh, you remember how well that worked out. And we’re also now paying for daycare for Miss Celie. Our rate of saving has slowed down dramatically.

And moving is expensive. You have to put down deposits, you have to rent a truck, you have to pay installation fees for cable/satellite, the phone, etc. Not to mention you have to pack up all your crap.

Things are dark over here in my little corner of the universe. It will pass. We will find a place. We might manage to stay in this new place until we can afford to buy something. Think good thoughts.

Let the wild rumpus start!

2009-08-04T16:45:00.001-07:00

It's officially August and you know what that means…it's my birthday month! Huzzah! I proudly celebrate my soon-to-be 41 years on this planet.

I discovered today that it is Barack Obama's birthday today (I don't know how that escaped me before). I did not realize he was a fellow Leo, but now it all makes sense.

As we were passing the CNN building in Hollywood this morning, I noted the date on their ticker on the outside of the building and blurted out, "Hey! It's only a week from my birthday!" I got that excited feeling in my stomach – so funny that it's such an automatic reflex.

Viva said, "It is? We're celebrating your birthday this weekend, then. What do you want to do?"

Hmm. I don't know. I'm taking Monday off and getting a facial and maybe going for a walk on the beach and then browsing around a bookstore and then sitting in a café and reading a new book and listening to the iPod until it's time to go pick up Cily from day care. On my actual birthday, I imagine we will go out to eat after work (yes, I'm going to work on my birthday, I know).

One of my favorite birthday memories is of having a birthday party at the park by the Charles River in Boston when I turned 6. My mom made me a cool cake with a swimming pool on the top and little tiny babies with swimsuits she made by winding embroidery thread around to cover them strategically. I remember the diving board was made out of a piece of gum. I would like that kind of party. A little picnic by the water, with a paper tablecloth and party hats. Maybe not a piñata this time around. Maybe just a little bit of a rumpus?

Let the games begin…

Scatterisms

2009-07-31T13:44:00.001-07:00

BADNESS

I am super stressed, so much so that I experienced my first migraine recently. I would have given anything not to reach that milestone.

The pressure is on at work, we owe some ridiculous amount of money in taxes, my laptop has just given up the ghost, and the baby is once again teething and thus not sleeping well and thus neither am I. I am exhausted and took the day off yesterday to recoup. I went to the hardware store*, to the library**, to Macy's***, to the car wash, and finally to treat myself and get a pedicure. Hmm, wonder why I'm still kind of tired?

This will pass. It's just a rough patch.

GOODNESS

On the positive side, Viva is loving camp and really enjoying her summer. Despite liberal applications of sunscreen, she is nearly as dark brown as her daddy. Her goal is to be darker than he is by the end of the summer. (Again, the competitive streak rears its head.) Recently I was lotioning her after her bath and I noticed that while I think of her as a little lanky thing, she is really muscular. Her thighs are just solid muscle. I mentioned this to Sweet Dub and he said, "She's swimming for an hour every day. If I did that, I'd be in great shape too!" Oh, yeah. So there's that.

Cily is, aside from the teething, off and running – well, crawling. And pulling up to stand. And cruising on the couch. And patting my arm ever so gently and sweetly when I pick her up out of her crib, as if to reassure herself that I am there. She also likes to jam a few fingers into my mouth to inspect my teeth, usually at inopportune times. She is also, I am pretty sure, The Loudest Baby on Earth. She makes noise in her sleep, constantly, and practically every minute that she's awake, if she's not chewing something, she's telling the world her every thought in minute detail or blowing raspberries.

As for me, I am investigating a creative outlet, and I can't say more about it because I don't want to jinx myself. But I'm tentatively putting my toes in.

STRANGENESS

Seen just today, on my morning drive in:

An old man shuffling down Fountain Ave. wearing a Santa Claus hat with elves all over it. Just hear those sleigh bells ringin, they're jing-jing-jinglin…

A teenager wearing a Superman shirt and cape, with Superman pajama pants, walking purposefully up Cahuenga Blvd. At least he wasn't wearing superhero tights. I just don't need to see that. At the same time, I don't know that he's going to be taken seriously by anyone in his fight against crime in light blue pajama pants with superheroes printed on them, so that worries me a little.

* Had to buy some screws because our dishwasher door fell off. So yeah, part of my relaxing day was spent shoving and screwing the door back together, on the dirty floor of my filthy kitchen which really needs washing.

** Three times in one day. The first two times I drove around and around looking for a parking spot with no luck, and finally I walked over there with the baby in the stroller after picking her up from day care. I had library books on hold and it was the last day I could go get them. Of course. But the good news is, I picked up Pippi Longstocking, and Viva LOVES it. I love it when I introduce something I love to somebody I love and they get it. How could you not love Pippi and Mr. Nilsson? And Villa Villekulla? Sweet Dub was so excited-slash-nostalgic that he began searching for the DVDs online immediately.

*** For a bra fitting, which was mortifying and completely useless because the Macy's Lingerie Fitter measured me WRONG. She kept trying to get me to go with a smaller bra, and then when I tried on the sizes she was pushing on me, I was spilling out of them. What the dilly? I realized that she was hung up on band size, which is why my bras aren't fitting me correctly, but she was getting my cup size wrong. I went with her band measurement and with the cup size I have been wearing all along, and I am much more comfortable and the girls look great. End of ridiculous story.